Top row (left to right): the Jerome Gold King and his pet donkey Pedro; my badass birthday Haunted Hamburger; Kerry crosses the line. Middle row (left to right): Monument Valley spire; Grand Canyon with eggplants. Bottom row: grand pano.-----A whistle-stop was all we afforded the Grand Canyon; it was our intention all along to take snapshots and move on, figuring the size and scope of America's greatest natural attraction was bigger than our two-week plans to see as much as we could. From Kanab we visited the less-visited North Rim and breathed in a few vantage points. But after being so close and personal with previous stops, the Grand Canyon seemed unapproachable. At least for our schedule, and I will grant it that. It's really a destination unto itself. But it was on this day, traveling to Sedona, we did witness the true openness of American southwest desert country – there is indeed not much going on between the Canyon and Flagstaff beyond scrub, Harleys and a Navajo-language lite-rock radio station. Sedona, on the other hand, is a comparative oasis of enterprise, traffic and eyebrow-raising New Age craziness. We took a day off from nature and went on a birthday excursion to nearby Jerome, a reinvented hillside mining town now dedicated largely to a lively arts and crafts scene. Despite this, we concocted a visit to the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town – essentially a glorified packrat scrapyard for some red-blooded American kitsch (with donkey!), and a stop-in at the Haunted Hamburger for the most badass of all the world's hamburgers. Shopping was also in order; I procured a sweet Stetson cowboy shirt. This was to be as far from home as we would go. From here we would turn back north, through the Painted Desert and Tuba City (a most disappointing town, in comparison to its name), past the Coyote-and-Roadrunner-inspired monoliths of Monument Valley and into Colorado for a visit to the ruins of Mesa Verde National Park.
Top row (left to right): Bryce Canyon at sunrise; the colours! Middle row (left to right): juniper antlers; our car shall not pass; dwarfed in Zion. Bottom row (left to right): look up, look way up; the rocks are melting.-----
The drive from Old Faithful to Bryce Canyon, Utah, was longer than I anticipated – near-empty interstates and 80mph speed limits notwithstanding. But the day was encouraging in that we ably ditched the snow of Yellowstone for the sun of the desert in a matter of hours. Regression back to summer kicks an early winter's ass every time.Warmer weather in tow, we could finally ditch the car and set out on foot – which we did at Bryce, totaling over 2o kilometres of ups and downs in the candyland spires of this fantastic place. The park is comparatively compact, and with one solid day we got a good fill of what the place is about. Starting out at daybreak on the less-traveled Fairyland Loop trail, we walked and gawked at this trippy otherworld. My memory card filled fast with amazing hues of red, yellow and white. Nearer midday we connected with some of the park's more popular routes for those willing to navigate the switchbacks into the canyon floor, made our way out of the park's namesake "ampitheater" through the cavernous formations of Wall Street, and finished with an exhausting return to the car via the Rim Trail from one end to the other. The place never ceased to amaze; some of its geography was near laughter-inducing. And in our combined stupour we both received fine October sunburns.Bryce is for lovers of good lighting. The next day allowed us time to slowly make our way to nearby Zion National Park and Kanab, our ensuing place to crash for the night – and I used this opportunity to leave pre-dawn to catch one of Bryce's famous sunrises while Kerry slept. It did not disappoint; I camped out in a good spot with other photographers on the same pilgrimage and watched the show.We would experience Zion in a similar vein (sans vehicle), but a random day of shunts and spurs was laid out in between. The nearby rehabilitated ghost town of Grafton made a fine turnaround point – we checked out its rickety remains and desert cemetery before making a bee-line to Kanab, and failed attempts to locate two other nearby ghost towns before nightfall. Kerry wrote about one such attempt, to find the town of Paria, that I hope to show in the future. She's a great storyteller.Zion and Bryce are two hours apart, yet on altogether different planets. Where Bryce displays delicacy and curiousity, Zion imparts sheer blunt force. It's the immovable object, with vistas and grandeur to rival any mountain range. Playing one-day tourists, we hopped the park's shuttle service and made an attempt on its most famous hiking excursion, the Angel's Landing trail, a precipitous series of switchbacks and chain-aided clifftop scrambles. But so did every man and his dog (or kids), and midway we opted instead for a palette of lesser-known – and just as thrilling – hikes into hanging valleys, porous, dripping cliff faces and crevasse-like dry canyons.That night, and the night previous, we stayed in the area hub of Kanab – home of two highly-recommended establishments: the Rocking V Cafe and the wonderfully-eclectic Bob-Bon Motel. I won't do this often, but both of these places were very, very cool.
Top row (left to right): Kerry, at the northwest entrance; Lower Falls, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; foyer of the Old Faithful Inn. Middle row (left to right): colours on display at West Thumb; I can't see a damned thing. Bottom row: Mammoth Hot Springs.-----
I've decided to break down our epic, 8,000-kilometer road trip into bite-sized pieces – this because I worked my camera(s) overtime and have spent much of the past week culling and processing photos (we returned last Saturday night). I don't want to write a marathon, and for those of you not keen on the written word, there is a newly-posted Flickr photo set of snapshots and stitched panoramic photos now available. I've gotten as far as our time spent in Yellowstone National Park. More will follow.Yellowstone was our first stop. It would end up being nothing like the remainder of our trip, an anomaly in every sense of the word. It was cold, snowy, blustery. It was also insanely eerie, otherworldly and head-scratching. It's a zoo of a park, encapsulating so many unique landscapes, creatures and bizarre geological oddities it made us sometimes laugh. We saw much more of the park in our three days than we ever intended, hoping to tough out a pair of long day hikes. But the temperatures and constant threat of snow kept us close to Bill, our unsuspecting and prairie-spoiled Honda Civic.Our first two days were spent making the best of less-than-ideal conditions. Luckily the place was so fascinating; the glut of hot springs, fumaroles, steam vents, hissing puddles, gurgling mud pots, teasing half-geysers and neon pools all did their part to distract and temporarily warm us up. We explored Yellowstone's north end: Mammoth, the Lamar Valley and one of its resident grizzly bears, Tower Fall, Norris and the park's namesake canyon. The weather channel was predicting the worst, snow was falling in the higher altitudes and we feared we'd have to scuttle our last day.But the next morning, we awoke to sunshine and newly-reopened roads to the south, passing through the bison-clogged Hayden Valley, West Thumb and the famous swath of geysers surrounding the even-more-famous Old Faithful itself, capped with a one-night stay at the grand and rickety Old Faithful Inn (meeting up with online friend and Baltimore-based photographic whiz Janet Little, coincidentally shooting in the area). The sun and patches of fresh snow made for an entirely different day than the previous two; even though it was just as crisp, it was decidedly more pleasant. And the new light provided all manner of great photo opportunities.Onwards and downwards, we'd had enough of this early winter and headed for the heat. Our next night would be spent in the southern fringes of Utah.
In a couple of days we're heading out on vacation, a road trip that will take us to Yellowstone National Park and then south to a whole wadge of scenic stops in southern Utah and northern Arizona. When we return, I'll be busy as snot no doubt – not to mention a year older (can I get a woohoo for birthdays on the road) – so hold tight and I'll be back on here and posting in about a month's time.In the meantime here's a deer for you, another one of my May Day drawing assignments – based from this photo taken on a thick-fog morning in the Whiteshell, the last time we had an October vacation. Hopefully more moments are to come. Stay warm.
Kerry was away last week, leaving me with a dozen cobs of corn and a wadge of bachelor time. It was largely uneventful, but on a pair of occasions I took the car out for some evening and late-night photography with the little-used remote control I had bought for my camera. I gathered some CDs and some Muskol and traveled east, to the ruins of the old Pinawa Dam and Tulabi Falls in Nopiming Provincial Park.
On my first trip out, I headed straight for Tulabi Falls (above). With all the rain this summer, they were thundering. This is the first set of gentle rapids before the water really gets going. I love how the falls drain directly from the calm of Tulabi Lake.
The falls connect Tulabi Lake and the larger Bird Lake (above). I watched the sun set here as mosquitoes searched for any cracks in my Muskol coverage. They were absolutely brutal.
With the remote, I took long-exposures of the stars. In the Nopiming there is zero light pollution, and with no moon out I needed my camping headlamp to punch settings into the camera and find a focus. I pointed it straight up for this 100-second shot of the Milky Way. Later I took this portrait of the night-time forest with Jupiter, lighting the ground with the headlamp.
Before I left, I headed to the boat launch at Tulabi Lake thinking I could view some nice reflections off the water. The northern lights were out, but they were weak and fading quickly – this 120-second exposure caught them before they disappeared for keeps. The full image can be viewed, here.
On a second day out I visited the old Pinawa Dam, one of the province's most photogenic spots. There's plenty of exposed shield rock, rapids and the eerieness of the decommissioned dam's ruins, slowly being reclaimed by nature. This shot (above) is a composite; one photo was taken of the water and lower landforms, and a second one was taken to capture tones of the evening sky. They were then merged in Photoshop.
I dig food. Breads and cereals? I'm there. I love the whole wheat multi-grain loaves at the hippie bakery down the street as much as a jumbo box of Corn Pops™. Dairy? Yes. God yes. You can't mellow a mouth-shredding bowl of Corn Pops™ without milk, and I can't comprehend where I'd be in this world without the cheeses. Meats? Nuts? Eggs? Yes, yes and yes. This wonderful, magical group is responsible for the luscious vendor-cart smokie in my hand, pulled pork that graces my poutine at a recent ballgame (above), the walnuts in my brownie – and the impenetrable density of said quality brownie.
But as much as I do love the fat and the junk, I am equally drawn to the undenying appeal of the home-grown veggie – except beets, because beets suck – so when I witness the array of colour at the farmers' market or a parked pickup truck with cobs of corn spilling off its tailgate, I'm drawn. Our meagre backyard garden had its ups and downs this season. Basil and lettuce produced early and often. A redeeming September, following a cool and wet summer, is giving hope to our eggplants, surging chard and stunted pepper plants. But our normally foolproof prize tomato patch took a big hit this year, suffering from unending rain, eavestrough overflows and mystery ailments that attacked their foliage. We're making hay with what small fruit developed (above) – but our biggies are likely not gonna make it.So, if you will, a moment – for our dear departed tomatian backyard homies. The Lord of Food took ye too soon.
This past week, I enlisted in another doodle swap, an insider circuit of mostly-American graphic designers partaking in the ever-popular hobby of creating artist trading cards (ATCs, for hipsters in the know) – 2.5"-by-3.5" non-digital artworks mailed back and forth between game participants. My first-ever swap was documented earlier in the year.This time, I ditched the randomness and stuck to a theme – that of, well, birds with glasses. Six of the even dozen I created are here; the full set can be viewed on my Flickr photostream. These pieces were all sketched lightly in pencil on pre-cut Strathmore watercolour cards, overlaid with light, one-tone washes, then inked up nice with both fine-nib and calligraphic-nib pens. Shadows were then quickly accented with a light grey marker. All told, each entry took between 15-25 minutes to complete.
One of the handful of projects that has kept me occupied over the latter half of summer has been a logo design for my good friend's local start-up venture. This assignment simmered slowly and comfortably over much of the summer, and followed a fairly uneventful and standard process for logo development until one fateful night, when it was turned on its ear by a dream. More on that later.
The company – currently being crafted by recent PrairieView School of Photography grad Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk – is Hodgepodge Creative (site under work, but be sure to check the blog), a one-woman wrecking crew of skills ranging from professional photography to creative and journalistic writing to audio/video production.
The trick then for her logo-designer-in-arms, as per her wishes, was to express this wide-ranging skills set within a single, strong – and simple – all-encompassing visual. And following an initial coffee-house meetup to discuss and peruse her then brand-new portfolio, I sent her on an expedition to gather together visuals that shared common traits with what she had in mind for her own business (not a standard procedure, but between friends one can do this).
Sarah came through in spades; she is a great client (Sarah, if you're reading this, you are a great client). She had a strong built-in sense of what she wanted in terms of look/feel, colour schemes and general aesthetics. And I'm a huge fan of not having to mind-read. Who is?
From her Big List of Inspiring Visuals, I was able to confidently go about building a few options, then submit them for further discussion and refinement. Two concepts (above) played largely on her zeal for the outdoors and knack for nature photography, and utilized compatible tones as such. A third (below) took on a more abstract/typographic form. All were received well and good, and constructive feedback was lent.
“The word ‘hodgepodge’ makes me think of a pig,” Kerry said to me around this point (I’m paraphrasing). “You should do one with a pig.”
And that night, I dreamed of a logo concept – with a pig. The next day, I set to work.
After time, the concept – that of a creative beast of many talents – eventually came to fruition (above). Much tweaking and haranguing was involved, particularly in how the three equal elements would join and/or overlap. It was important that no one element overshadow the other two, and yet a single, blended shape was not achieving the desired outcome. I finally came about with offshoots of red, green and blue – representative of the colour model used in displaying images electronically.
I felt it imperative Sarah remain integral in the development of the final result (below). Throughout the process I included her input on style, colour and typographic decision-making, which eventually resulted in a last handful of tweaks; dropping the bold – yet perhaps overly-industrial – typeface for an earthier, friendlier one, and an automnal colour palette more in tune with her company's character and focus of her work.
I thought I'd take a break from the grid format to tell the tale of our Saturday just past. It was a glorious day out, so we took off to the Whiteshell for a hike.
The summer's been wet; a near write-off – but apparently excellent for mushrooms. First I saw this high school fire alarm bell jobbie. I wanted to pull it to get out of gym class.
I got a little closer, to view these fan-fugu-tastic spiky Viva Puffs.
And then I shelved my discomfort of fungi altogether for this giant, super gills-flipped-inside-out number.
Our lunch spot we shared with this chipmunk. In rapid succession it shunned my offerings of carrot, a grape, and then a smaller, more chipmunk-suitable grape.
On our return, we took turns on this made-for-dozing tree. It was much more suited to the contours of my back, despite how at peace Kerry seems here.
Over a fire that evening, I grilled some corn cobs and smoked-gouda-topped portobellos. These were inserted into buns – with tomatoes, basil and lettuce from our garden – and chased with s'mores.
