Spring Moab Trip 2013! Last weekend I had the opportunity to sneak away to Southern Utah and enjoy the red rocks and national parks that surround Moab, Utah. I was able to catch up with my good friends Hilton and Fred who were visiting from California. They had spent the whole week backpacking and I was able to join them for the last part of their trip. I then spent the rest of the weekend with Mike exploring Arches National Park. It wouldn’t be a weekend away without taking a few pictures. Enjoy!

Portrait Photography! Over the last few weeks I have been taking various portraits at work for our new marketing initiatives. It is always fun to develop my personal hobbies while at work. It makes going to work everyday such a pleasure.

Today was one of the rare occasions where I ended up on the other side of the camera and got a pretty good portrait.

Multimedia Engineer! Work is keeping me busy today with a fun new project involving the production of safety training videos and other various marketing materials. It is fun that my personal hobbies often translate into projects for work.

Red Butte Gardens! After several months of time consuming school and work I managed to take my camera out of the closet. It was great to go up to Red Butte Gardens and photograph some of the beautiful flowers. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Salt Lake.

Big Piney Wyoming! Work sent me all over the mountain west this summer with trips to Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. I had many opportunities to capture this beautiful landscape with my trusty little Canon S95.

One of the jobs sites I worked at was located near Big Piney, Wyoming. I was impressed with the vast landscape, beautiful scenery and the open sky with picturesque cloud formations.

This picture was taken just south of Big Piney driving toward Kemmerer on my way back to Salt Lake City, Utah. It was edited using Aperture 3 and captured on 5 August 2011 around 6pm.

Detailed Tacoma Truck! It has been a beautiful week in Salt Lake and the weather finally getting warm. Every so often I like to pamper my truck with a nice detailing and cleaning. The shop does a great job and they have a professional crew comb through every edge to make sure the truck is looking its best. Although the truck is starting to show its age, I still like to keep it clean and looking sharp.

I took a few images with my phone and the sunlight was a little too harsh so I grabbed my Nikon D300 and turned on exposure bracketing to convert this to a HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. Unlike my Classic Car HDR images which have a very cartoonish feel, with a few changes of the setting you can make an HDR image look very sharp and clean. I’ve included the “standard” non-edited image and the image after the exposure bracketing merge and minor adjustments.

Images (actually seven bracketed images) were taken with my Nikon D300 with my AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens without a tripod. The HDR merge was performed via Photomatix Pro and then brought back into Aperture 3. Enjoy!

Friday Cape Cod! I had a short day in the office and came home and cleaned the house and got the backyard ready for the weekend festivities. The place looks fantastic and I had music playing pretty loud during the afternoon. After all my efforts it was time to relax and enjoy my Absolut 100 Vodka with some cranberry juice. Enjoy.

Green Valley Falls Hike! I was able to visit my family in California a few weeks ago and while I was there my mom organized a hike through her hiking club. We went to the Green Valley Falls which are essentially in the backyard where I grew up. A short drive down the road from my parents house you have these beautiful hills and this fantastic trail.

The trail and valley are owned by the city of Vallejo and they restrict access year round granting occasional authorized and guided hikes. The falls are just outside the city of Fairfield out toward Cordila off of Green Valley Road. Those are the hills that separate Fairfield and Solano County from the Napa Valley.

The trail was only a few miles round trip and there is a slight elevation change. We were lucky to go in the first part of May after a pretty wet spring so the falls were full of water and the vegetation was very lush. We had to watch out for poison oak and there were lots of birds, butterflies and other animals during our hike.

I have included a few pictures that I took while we were hiking. They were taken with my Nikon D300 and the first three were five or seven exposure bracketed and then merged to HDR. The last image is of my sister, her boyfriend and my mom. Enjoy.

Website Redesign! Earlier this weekend while working on various projects I had the thought that my website was looking a little out of date and never really had the right design for my tastes. After spending a few minutes looking through WordPress.org’s extensive theme collection, I came across one that was designed by a developer in Sweden. The theme is called “The Common Blog” and had most of the elements I was looking for my site and figured I could add any element(s) that were missing.

After downloading the files and exploring the theme on my test server I was able to make some changes to the theme to meet my needs. Some of the core strengths that attracted me to this theme were the open spaces and larger fonts. It seems cleaner and easier to read. My previous theme also had a large variety of different colors that I found distracting to my photographs. This redesign has me going in the right direction but there are still lots of little details that I haven’t tested or investigated.

This a screen shot of my website that I captured a few months ago:

It is a little sad to see that old design going away. Luckily I still have all the files and if I ever want to revive it, the process would take a few minutes because I have all the source information.

Feel free to let me know what you think of the redesign and if there is anything that seems broken. I like to think of websites as complex machines that have many bells, levers and controls and changing any one can make or break the system. Enjoy!

Sunday Smoothies! After a great workout at the gym and all the work put into the garden, Charlie and I decided to make a tasty smoothie with some strawberries, oranges, bananas, and various juices. Yummy!