Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Laugh


About a week ago my sister and I took a quick trip to the Gilgal Sculpture Garden, just off 7th East and 500 South in Salt Lake City.  After taking a few shots of the bizarro assortment of LDS doctrine-meets-eccentric-sculptor artifacts, I talked my sister into posing for a few test portraits.  I wanted to see if I could get anything out of my camera's 6 shot-per-second advertised frame rate, so I told her to head-bang a bit.

The shot above is the result.

I was really happy with the sharpness and the energy that comes from her hair flying all over the place, but what I like best about this picture is how perfectly it captures her personality.  Anyone who knows my sister knows she comes with a striking, happy laugh, and in my opinion, this portrait captures that energy perfectly.

Monday, March 15, 2010

A Galaxie Far, Far Away


This vacant building might be familiar to longtime (or not so longtime) residents of Bountiful.  It's planted halfway between Burger King and Barnes and Noble just off the 500 South exit.

For about ten years starting in the mid 1990's, this place was home to the Galaxie Diner, a 1950's throwback restaurant pimped out in chrome and vinyl.  From the summer of 1994 to the fall of 1995, I must have eaten there more than fifty times.

I wasn't in love with the food or anything, though they had some great fries and a jukebox with an assortment of proper 1950's-60's tunes.  Galaxie was a popular destination because it was one of the only places around town that stayed open past 10PM on the weekends that wasn't called Denny's, Village Inn or Dee's.

By the time I got back from my mission, the place had lost most of its luster.  When it first opened, the Galaxie Diner employees would jump up on counters and tables to dance whenever someone put "Greased Lightning" on the jukebox, but by the dawn of the new millennium, a lot of the enthusiasm had waned.  Eventually the place shut down, was reborn briefly as an obligatory Chinese Buffet, then landed in its current state.


The End.