Another one from the hike a few days ago!

Illustration, Design, and Motion Graphics
There’s a 5 second delay on the animation. My father has a film in the Sun Dance Film Festival this year. He was one of two cinematographers on the movie Blackfish. So, as of Friday he will be traveling down to Park City, Utah to partake in all the festivities!
This prompted him to want to update the picture of himself on his website. Which is where I came in. He wanted something that showed he was both professional, but still funny and good natured. This is what I came up with. Also, this was one of the rare times that I actually light and shoot people. Definitely a fun way to flesh out an idea’s been floating around for awhile. 🙂
On a side note, would anyone care to trade a couple RAW files? I would edit a couple of your photos, and you would edit a couple of mine. It would preferably be images that you and I have both already posted. I’ve been curious to do this for some time, just to see how different people handle the same material. It could be .jpg files to, I can work those almost as well as RAW. Comment to let me know and I’ll get a dropbox set up!
As I’m sure most folks are familiar with, when roads are made in the mountains they often have manmade cliffs over them. These little cliffs almost always have delightful little falls or showers where streams that once flowed now fall. This fern was in on of these showers.
My umbrella was being blasted with water from the showers the whole time I was setting up and shooting. I have to thank my roommate for holding it and keeping me dry.
My roommate and I went to explore the snowy mountains the other. And he kindly put up with me carrying my camera everywhere. We drove up a scenic highway to where it was closed for the year. The rest of the day was spent going though snow filled camp grounds waiting for springs warm embrace.
From wandering through a desaturated world, I quickly became obsessed with finding all of the remaining bits of color that I could.
These photos are just in the order that I took them through the day.
I did take a few very cool cinemagraphs too. I haven’t had the time to put those together. I’ll probably do one a day for the next four days so that I have time to work on other projects as well.
Everything else I took was for cinemagraphs, so look for those over then next few days!
So a short (slightly long) while ago I found and explored a now abandoned farm. I’ve been sitting on them not doing anything for a deplorably long time, but here a few at long last.
This is where I would normally have some sort of establishing shot to give context to the rest of the photos, but unfortunately the sky and light were poor enough that I don’t have any worth sharing. The upside however, is that through a bit of asking around, I was able to find out the history of that plot of land and learn why it sits as it does today!
Up until about ten years ago this had been a working buffalo farm. On its last leg, but on a property with a fairly good location, it sold the whole plot to Walmart, who had every intention of building their next super duper store there. This is where I am missing some information. About eight or nine years ago they got as far as starting to get construction equipment there. Apparently they stopped rather quickly as well because the contractors trailer is still there, long since over grown with brambles.
After they ceased, it was all just left to the tides of time. In some places it was clearly an active place to party with beer cans sewn about. In the motor pool an owl now lives, speckling the floor with droppings and pellets.
A lot of the frame work of the house was still standing, though charred almost beyond recognition. There is still a large section of the second floor and the chimney and things attached to it remain in tack.
Once you start to move away from the heart of the house, there is less and less left standing.
And finally, in lost in some deep grass, someone had to suffer from cold feet.
Post: I haven’t been very active on here the last few days. I’ve been exploring snowy campgrounds with my roommate, teaching my family how to snowboard, doing some hand illustrating, learning to make animated walk cycles, and starting to work on a large .gif project. So, I might be quiet for a few more days, but I’m still cooking away at projects.
Thanks for getting to the bottom of this!
Another moving thing. I’m getting much faster at figuring out the type alignment and such. I think next I’m going to try to make a couple in AfterEffects instead of Photoshop to see if I can do more with them there.
The background is a photograph of  a smashed car outside of an abandoned loading warehouse.
Here’s one of today’s projects. This was surprisingly difficult. With how easy it was for circles, I expected it to work the same, but keeping the type aligned was a challenge. I got it figured out just fine in the end though. 🙂
I’ll have the rest of the photos from the abandoned farm up soon!
Went back and experimented with a photograph. Building ideas for how this could be put to better use in the near future!
I want to work with these a LOT more. Very very easy, and very fun to make. From the start of post to the exporting of the .gif this took maybe 15-20 minutes.
A couple of more photos from visiting my grandfolks in the small town of Morton.
No one in my family really talks to much about the kennels in particular, so I don’t know very much about them past their age an that they look hauntingly lovely now. The kennel and barn sit at the back of my grandparents property. I used to trek out to it as a kid in the summer, during which it involves traveling through many patches of stinging nettles.
While most all things here are in some state of decay, the sign still looks like it was painted in the last couple years.
On a personal note, not that this should be surprising at this point, I love hand painted signs. Even when they are done with the utmost perfection, there’s always a human element that is almost impossible to recreate in a digital format.