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...

Stage Right: The Velour 5th Anniversary Show

Friday night the Velour Live Music Gallery celebrated its 5th anniversary with a show that featured Jennifer Blosil, The Neighbors, The Vibrant Sound, and The Imagine Dragons. The venue was so crowded that I pretty much got stuck in the same position stage right for the whole evening, but I was still able to get some decent shots out of the effort:

Jennifer Blosil:

The Neighbors:

The Vibrant Sound:

The Imagine Dragons: