Rio Grande Gallery - June 2012

Three Kings Bike Race 2012

Faithful readers of the blog will recall that last year I did some photography for the North Salt Lake Three Kings Bike Race.Link The Three Kings is a thirteen mile race in which riders are timed on the uphill portions on the east bench of North Salt Lake. The grade is over 20% at times, and even goes through some nasty sections of s-curve that the local fire department can't access with its bigger trucks.

This year, Mike Taylor's helicopter was in the shop for some repair work, so I had to take pictures from the back seat of this: 

It was pretty much awesome. 

You may think it wouldn't be that fun doing 15-30mph on residential roads in a car that seems to be doing 130mph just standing still. Any time the riders got close, Mike didn't even put much foot into it and that Camaro came alive. Kneeling up and facing backwards while looking through a camera lens may have made it feel like we were going a lot faster than we were. 

One of the things I tried to do this time was take some shots that would work for the Three Kings Facebook page cover photo. The cover photo is a 851 x 350 crop ratio making it a really wide shot. It also has the person's log or photo in the lower left-hand side, so the interesting element should be to the right. 

So here are the crops for cover photo consideration

While not an official participant of the race, this guy had as much heart as anyone else.

And shots from the race

Overall winners: Justin Hogge

and Julie Semans

Five Sixty-Fours

In the last month we have lived in three homes. All three have the same house number.

Eerie coincidence or harbinger of doom?

Emily Senior Picture Poll Results

I figure if you set up a poll, you should probably report the results. As of 6/3/12 (which I haven't had a vote since 5/21 so I figure we're safe) we've had 34 votes. A tie for the favorite photograph goes to pictures:

3

and 6

and third place is #10

It's interesting to me that all three of the favorites were black and white (minus the very fancy floral border on #10.) 

I'm going to confess something - lots of the time I remove the color I've botched one of the settings and am seeing if there is anything salvageable. My favorite picture of the day was #6. We had moved in front of one of the fountains on Temple Square, and I had forgotten to adjust the shutter speed for the first few pictures. 

The pose ended up so nice (great job Emily) that I thought I would just wash them completely out, bring out the shadows, and remove the color. I couldn't be happier with how they turned out. (For the record, #3 really was intended to be black and white.)

Once I corrected the camera settings we shot this one

I'm not going to tell you who taught me the trick of trying black and white or sepia if I botched settings on a photograph, but it wasn't Patti.  

Spring Foal

Tom Dixon's Chickens

They look like muppets to me

The Four Altos

Okay - some of them might be Sopranos - insert joke about the only difference is that altos know how to read music.

The Last Spring Birthday of 2012

The last of the spring birthdays has come and gone. 6/8ths of our family is in even years until the end of July.

Happy Birthday Steven - enjoy a candy bar bigger than your head,

A Dr. Who Tshirt,

And some yucky cake.

(Birthday cake comes in two flavors: chocolate and yucky - personal editorial)