No Aspirin Required

Shot another concert in Salt Lake recently. This one was at a benefit for The Children's Home Society up at the Post Theater on the University of Utah campus. The featured act was Heather's Headache, a band out of DC that features The Cheetahman's brother-in-law on lead guitar.

It was also significant because they played a similar benefit last year, and that event was the first concert I ever covered. Eventually it all comes full circle...

Forever in Red Without You*

Last weekend I confronted the demons of my adolescence and took my camera to a youth dance up in Layton. My friend Kyle Green of My Favorite DJ was performing (do DJ's perform?), and in spite of the difficult lighting (church gyms can't be "too" dark in order to avoid excessive make-outage, and fog machines set off the fire alarms), I was able to get some interesting images:

*If anyone is confused by the title of this post, it is a mash-up of those three pillars of the 1990's youth dance experience: "Forever Young" by Alphaville, "With or Without You" by U2, and "Lady in Red" by...well, to tell the truth I really don't know. And I'm honestly not interested in Googling it to find out.

Spring Snowstorm: Images from Spring 2011 LDS General Conference

Every six months the LDS church hosts a series of globally televised conference sessions out of their headquarters in Salt Lake City, UT. Some people lovingly refer to it as, "Mormon Woodstock," and even though there aren't any searing guitar covers of the national anthem by Jimi Hendrix or blatant displays of public nudity, it is a fantastic photo opportunity.

Usually I'll go downtown in the hopes of catching some interesting shot that juxtaposes the attendees filing past one of the many local street preachers who gather on corners to preach Hell, fire and damnation. But today, the weather must have dampened the preachers' spirits, because only a few of them showed up to torment the faithful. Instead, the early April snowfall yielded the most compelling images:

Pastel Paradise

Last weekend I paid my first visit to the Holi Festival of Colors at the Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, UT. I had heard of the event for a couple years running, and of course saw all the photos from the festival posted on Facebook, but I put off going because I wasn't crazy about exposing my camera equipment to 5,000 college students throwing chalk in the air.

Luckily, thanks in part to a helpful article from another local photographer, I made the Saturday morning journey this year. Five hours, fifty crowd surfers, and 1,039 photos later, here are the results:

About ten minutes after the first color throw, what had been a snow-covered hillside became a muddy hillside, and the revelers took full advantage...

Mormon Graffiti

Just before New Year's I took a spin up past Brigham City to take pictures of this abandoned mill off I-15. It has become tradition over the years to use it as a makeshift billboard welcoming home local returned LDS missionaries.

It was a little tricky getting the shots; it's not what I would call an "accessible" area, between the barbed wire and the frozen marshes...and the freeway, of course. But I think the subject matter made it worth it. Plus it gave me an excuse to get a burger at Maddox on the way home.

It's Just a Fight

My buddy Dr. Thunder is into the MMA scene.  Every Saturday he drives down to Sandy to spar and grapple with some like-minded kindred spirits.  A couple of weeks back he invited me to swing down with him and take some pictures of he and the boys kicking the crap out of each other.  How do you say no to that?

There was a big whiteboard on one of the gym walls with a lot of random info on it.  At the top of the board, someone had written: "Remember, it's just a fight."