My Life in Pictures

BYU vs Colorado State

I’m a social football watcher. Meaning that if I were alone I wouldn’t watch football. The only exception being the UofU vs BYU game each year. Granted there’s always other people to watch the game with, but that is the one game that I’d watch alone if nobody else wanted to. Well yesterday someone gave me a ticket to the BYU vs Colorado State game so I figured I might as well take advantage of the opportunity. The opportunity I speak of isn’t really just to go watch the game, (although that’s somewhat interesting since I don’t go to football games very often) it’s actually more fun for me to go take pictures at it! So equipped with my trusty XSi and 18-250mm lens I headed up to the game with a group of friends. I sat with them for a while, then I went wandering around the stadium taking pictures as the game progressed up and down the field. Now presenting a couple of the pictures that I took that afternoon.

We all love Cosmo! The front row of people there in the picture are all my friends that I sat with for a time.

Yay for exuberant fans!

Max Hall with the legions of opponents out to get him!

Touchdown!

Job well done.

Look there's a bird! This quarterback doesn't get distracted!

Nice sunset shot of the stadium and moon. The video camera operator down there had an amazing zoom such that he could zoom in until his entire monitor was just the moon!

True Blue Football

True Blue Football is a yearly tradition at BYU as part of the Homecoming festivities. In the past it’s always been on Wednesday of homecoming week, but for whatever reason this year (probably because it’s usually cold during homecoming week) they had it three weeks before homecoming. I’m glad that they did, because it was warmer than it has been in the past. Although the name says football, most people actually just play in the foam because only a limited number of people can play the football part of the activity.

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This is JJ, one of my new roommates this fall.

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That's Melinda and I going down the slip and slide. It's pretty crazy awesome!

Another motorcycle ride

Whitney and I went up into the mountains on a ride and we took a few pictures. I liked these pictures with the city lights in the background. I had the camera on auto sequence mode so it took pictures as I was getting onto the motorcycle. Later when I was going through the pictures I found this sequence looked funny and I thought I’d share.

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2009 09 08 Motorcycle ride - Whitney Lewis 013

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This is what I discovered on my way to work today

Clever, but not even a brick wall stopped me from riding my motorcycle.

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Weird Moon Halo

Last night there was a weird atmospheric phenomenon going on that caused there to be a rainbow halo kind of thing around the moon. It was bizarre looking enough that there were about 10 people standing outside looking at it for a bit.

This is an HDR of the moon with some other tweaks to get the moon to show since it's naturally overexposed in order to see the halo.

Here is the same picture up a little closer

This is more what it looked like. See how the moon is completely washed out in order to see the rainbow halo.

This is just a regular picture of the moon that I took since I was already taking pictures of the moon

While I'm on the subject of moon pictures I might as well throw this one in there. This is a sequence of shots I took during a lunar eclipse back on August 28 2007. I have more moon pictures, but these are more related.

Can we say remote and desolate!

This weekend I went canyoneering in Larry Canyon – Robbers Roost Utah which was an awesome hike! Can we say waaaaay remote though?! We drove down south west of Green River, UT on a highway for some half an hour or so. Then we turned off onto a gravel road and drove on that for 38 miles! I don’t think I’ve ever driven continuously on gravel for that many miles before! Most of the road was in fairly good condition, but there were some sections…can we say “off roading” if we’re still technically on a road?

I took this picture while still in my sleeping bag right when I woke up in the morning at 6:22am.

This is what the roads looked like for a ways. It was quite fun to drive through the sandy sections.

So there I was driving down this road which was actually a dry wash and there is this drop off in my way! It's a good thing Gavin knew where he was going and we turned down a side road instead! This is actually the start of another canyon and to get into it you have to tie onto your parked car (make sure to set the brake well!) and rappel from that.

This is the whole crew fresh and ready to head out!

Mckell and I had the same Camelbak!

Gotta love the cool cave drawings! Just kidding, they're obviously our shadows on the canyon wall before our first rappel.

We had a run in with some tough characters!

This snake fell several hundred feet from the surface down into the slot canyon that we were in and it landed 4 feet away from Mckell! She jumped and might or might not have made a certain yelling sound.

There were a lot of fairly narrow spots...

Mckell is comparing and contrasting the relative narrowness of the canyon.

No we're not in a cave, we're in a slot canyon. But it was so narrow and deep it required flashlights in some parts!

For one section we had to walk slanted and support ourselves to the side as we went. It was tough going in spots, but quite beautiful!

Mckell lowering herself into the hole that lead into a vertical slot canyon with a bottom waaay below.

There were about 6 rappells along this canyon.

After climbing out of the canyon there was this nice strategically placed rock just waiting to be used.

In fact we all took advantage of that rock.

The whole crew after climbing out of the Canyon, to discover we still had a lot more climbing to do...

Mckell was really happy to see my car when we got to where we had left it that morning.

Conquering Mount Timpanogos

I’ve been meaning to hike Timp all summer, but I’ve been waiting for the snow to recede. Well that time has finally come. I got together some friends and we headed out on a Saturday morning at 1:30am and we got to the top right at 6am in time for the sunrise. It was about 35 degrees at the top and very windy, so needless to say we were very happy that we had brought jackets and wished that we had gloves. We stayed at the top for 50 minutes then we headed down. We decided to take a slightly different route back down which accidentally took us down the timpanooke route and we ended up 8 miles through the mountains away from our car…oops. Hey but we made it down the mountain in 3 hours! Just as we got to the wrong parking lot there was a loud crack of thunder and a deluge of rain began. We huddled in the 3 foot awning of an outhouse until we got a nice ranger volunteer guy to drive me back to the Aspen Grove parking lot so I could bring my car back and get the others. All in all it was a great adventure!

The whole crew as we embarked on the hike at 1:30am.

Mckell and I at the top with our backs to the wind as the sun was rising. It was COLD!

And the sun makes it's appearance! Ok I'll admit that I edited this picture to look cooler than it actually looked but the only thing I changed significantly was the black levels.

Another cool shot of the sunrise.

This shot is from near the top of Timp and shows the two smaller canyons below on the western face. One of which is Battle Creek Canyon which Mckell and I hiked up a few weeks ago.

A cloud enveloped the top of the mountain as we were descending and it looked really cool all around us.

Directly behind is us a thousand (give or take a couple hundred) foot sheer drop off!

Everyone except for Andrew who was below us.

Beautiful mountain meadows! This is right around the time when we took the wrong fork and went down the wrong trail.

There are some beautiful vistas on that trail!

This is the outhouse where we crowded to avoid getting wetter than we already were.

Meteor Shower!

I got together a group of around 9 people and we all drove out to the back side of Rock Canyon and we watched the meteor shower. It was pretty awesome and I got some cool pictures! I experimented for the first time in exposures longer than 30 seconds long.

This exposure was 15.7 minutes long at ISO 200 f/3.5

This picture was a 16.3 minute exposure at ISO 200 f/3.5

To give you an idea how dark it was for this shot I couldn't actually see anything when framing the shot. This was a 30 second exposure at ISO 1600 f/4.0

We 4 stayed until about 1:30am whereas the others all left earlier. It was a good show!

Rock Climbing in Rock Canyon

I got together a group of several people to go rock climbing, but some people couldn’t last minute so it turned out just being three of us. More climbing time for us in any case!

Mckell setup the rope for the rappel down.

I started out the first climb after everyone had rappelled down.

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Mckell was a great belayer.

Krysten made it to the top! No surprise there!

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2009 08 11 Rock Climbing in Rock Canyon 138

I love this picture!

Job well done!

Jump on it!

We had a bi-ward activity at a place called “Jump on it” that is basically a warehouse with many large trampolines. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.