Wow, what a cool surprise to wake up to this morning!

Thank You ^purpelblur for the Daily Deviation
Thank you ^kkart for the suggestion.

Hello everyone. I have to zip off to work but I'll see if I can answer your questions later today

Jon

I'm leaving on vacation for the next three weeks. I'll be in the Grand Canyon and the surrounding area. I got the chance to go on a 14 day rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I'm not sure when I'll get another chance like this, so I jumped on it.

On the way out we'll goof off in Arches, Monument Valley, etc. On the way back, we'll goof off in Zion.

I should be back around September 13th with a big pile of photos to process and share.

I can't wait

Have a great time everyone!

Jon

P.S. If you want to follow along, I'm going to update a blog along the way. I don't know how often I'll get time to work on it, but it's up and available [link]

The month of May has been an interesting month for me, artisticly speaking. Last year I ran across a set of incredible belly dancer photographs. I'd wanted to try my hand at a belly dancer photo shoot. Turns out I know a belly dancer, but she lives in Fairbanks, AK. A bit to much of a drive for a casual photo shoot Turns out that her sister is getting married in Colorado. We worked out the details and I borrowed my good friend Cindy's photo studio. We spend the day in there playing around.



The belly dancer, my buddy and I all met at the studio early on Saturday morning. Tinkered with the lights and the backdrop. Lots of test shots to figure out the lighting. Finally we were ready to begin.



We broke for lunch and returned for the final round of shots in the studio.



Then we were done. The overhead lights turned on, I had camera gear strewn around the studio. A camera set down casually here, some reflectors tossed aside once they were no longer useful. We were all tired, but it was a good tired. Everyone had given a lot of themselves to the photo session.

I'm not sure I'll get another chance to do a belly dancer photo shoot in the near future. I have new ideas to bring to the next shoot. I'm sure whomever I get to photograph will bring their own unique insights and gifts to the session as well.

I don't plan to post more than one or two of the shots from this session here on Deviant Art. They're fun photos, but it doesn't seem to match the tastes of everyone here. So enjoy three of my favorite images from the session

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The weekend of May 16th and May 17th I joined some of my good friends for a backpacking trip into The Great Sand Dunes here in Colorado. If you live here in Colorado, and you haven't visited, you've got to go. There isn't anything else quite like these giant sleeping behemoths of sand, tucked up against the mountains. At certain times of the year, there is a river flowing by the sand dunes. You can play in the river, climb up the dunes as high as you dare. A great deal of fun.



Our destination lay farther into the dunes. We drove deep into the park on a 4x4 trail before reaching a trail on the south east corner of the park. We parked the car, changed, pulled on our backpacks and headed off into the wilderness.



There is a lot I don't know about camping in the wilderness. Backpacking in the wilderness. Heck, just being out doors. I joked with my friends that I was keeping an eye out for an internet kiosk

The lure of this trip, and a couple future trips found me working to get myself into better shape this year. Starting in January I do a 2 hour set of calisthenics in Colorado Springs every Sunday morning. I can't get through the entire set yet, but I'm pleased with my progress. In February I started swimming laps. The goal is to see how many I can swim in 30 minutes. It varies from 15 – 21. I keep aiming for the 21 lap range.



You see that little line of trees extending into the left top third of the image? That was our next destination. On the other side of those trees, about a 100 feet or so was Cold Creek. Our next destination. Took a while to backpack down there. But we needed the water. We had to replenish our stores and fill up bottles for cooking and the return trip on Sunday.



Once the water was replenished, it was time to find our way back up the dunes and look for camp that evening. It was really challenging to get back up into the dunes. We didn't want to camp at the base of the dunes, we wanted to be in the dune field, surrounded by dunes, high up on a dune. Which, turns out to be a lot of hot, hard and tiring work. But, eventually we found our way to camp. This shot was one of my favorites. I took it partly as an excuse to rest for a minute. The above image turned into one of my favorite pictures from the trip.



We camped in this sheltered area of the dune. The one just left of center. The dots are our backpacks, and the one person who stayed behind, rather than foolishly clime the rest of the way up the large dune. I came up waiting for the sunset and the late day light on the dune field. There were to many clouds, it got windy and cold. So I gave up waiting for the light. And of course, it showed up. Silly me I did manage to get a couple good shots.





By some quirk I beat the sun up that morning. Once I was up and dressed, a couple of us set off in search of the early morning light.







After breakfast and breaking camp, we set off to find the car. Rather than go back down the dunes, and then up the trail, we chose to follow the dune ridge lines instead. We could keep the elevation that we had gained and find a way to meet up with the trail.

Everyone had different skill levels when it came to hiking. I kept falling behind because I'd stop to dig the camera out, look around, take some pictures and then realize where everyone else had gone This was a common sight for part of the morning.



We stopped for second breakfast and a little fun on the dunes. A friend loaned us her kite and we figured we should play with it a bit. You would think the Great Sand Dunes were winder than they were. I think it was the time of year. We got lucky with just very light winds. But not good kite flying weather.





We spend the rest of the morning, and part of the afternoon, backpacking back to the car. A quick dip in the cold cold river helped wash all the grime, sunscreen, sweat and bug spray off of my. I felt like a new man

It was a long and hard weekend in the Great Sand Dunes. But it was well worth the effort. I quite enjoyed myself.

May has a couple cave trips lined up, but I don't think I'll be taking the camera. New caves and I suspect they're going to be challenging as well. I have another backpacking/caving adventure in August.

And I might be on a 2 week rafting trip in the Grand Canyon late August-Early September. We'll see if I can scrape together the money

Have a great summer!

Jon

I got a chance to return to Breezeway, a really photogenic cave last weekend. Last year I took a photo trip into the cave. It was an incredible trip. I remember two things about that visit, how incredible some of the formations were (and how much fun it was to photograph them) and how unbelievably hard it was to make that trip

I remember the belly crawls that when for (what seemed like) miles and miles and miles. How heavy my camera gear got. How tired my arms got from pushing it over my head. How exhausted I was when I left that day.

I spend the last year working to get into better physical shape. I started doing power yoga. I recently picked up a Sunday workout that's 2 hours long. It works your core, arms and legs. But it's very good at building endurance.

This year's trip was hard, but not as hard as last year. We got a lot farther into the cave. We got through several interesting physical challenges with our camera gear. And we got back out at about the same time at night. I was tired, I did 4 times as much work and I wasn't nearly as dead as I was last time.

We entered the cave around 10:30 am. We made it to Stone River around 2:30 (or was it 3:30?), having stopped for lunch. We exited the cave around 8:30 that night.

Granted, I was tired. But I could get down the mountain to the car, I was save to drive. It was a lot of fun.

This trip we made it to an area known as “Stone River” It was quite the spectacular area. You hand to leave anything that had mud on it, on the far side of the area. So I'm walking around in shoes with non marking soles, some football practice shorts I'd found the night before, and my underarmor t-shirt. I'd planed on wearing a little more... but mud really did get everywhere. I was good for about an hour before I got too cold and needed to put more layers on and retreat further back into the cave

It was an excellent trip! Lots of fun pictures, learned more about photography. And I'm in better shape. Caving is more fun when you're in better shape. Who knew?

I've finished post production on the images and they should be going up shortly. More than the suggested 5 per day rule, but it's been a while since I posted. I hope you don't mind

When I posted my 5 favorite images from the road trip back from Alaska earlier this year, there were some images that I left out. I paired it down to 5 or so from 10ish images.

I went back through today and thought about those images. “Why can't I share them?” I wondered.



You can see where this leads. Anyways I figured since I haven't made a lot of time this summer to photograph the kind of image I like to post here, I figured I'd share a little more of my spring.

Enjoy the images!

Jon