Departures

Tonight my little brother Riley got his Webelos rank advancement in the Cub Scouts, as did the other three boys in the Webelos den. After the awards ceremony, my dad, who is the Webelos Den Leader, wanted me to snap a picture of the four scouts. After I took the picture, all the boys came rushing up to me asking "Can I see it?" When I was a kid, after a picture was snapped, I ran off, not caring to ever see the picture. Today, with the instant feedback that digital cameras provide, both the photographer and the photographed can immediately see the photograph (I know I’m stating the obvious here, and digital cameras weren’t the first to do this either - Polaroid photographs have given this ability for years before digital), and to a kid there is a lot of fun in seeing that image of him or herself immediately after the shutter has snapped. I can’t even count how many times my younger siblings and cousins have run up to the photographer demanding to see the picture.

Think of people in third world countries, who have never even seen themselves at all. A photographer goes over with a digital camera to record that village (or something close to a village), makes some photographs of the indigenous people and shows it to them. There would be a huge amount of wonderment and excitement. I know I can’t remember the first time I saw a photograph of myself. It was shown to me probably when I couldn’t even talk, by my mother showing a picture of me talking in a baby voice "that’s you!"

So…It’s been what, 6 months? Yeah, I’ve been blogging-lazy. Not much real new or exciting has been going on. Just work and coming home and being lazy. Well, until last week. I started camping at our job site that we’ve been at for about as long as I’ve been Blogging-AWOL. We’ve been there about six months and we’re not even half way finished. At present, we’re projected to be finished in the summer of 2008.
Last week when I camped up at the job site (the owner of the property had a yurt built there, and is gracious enough to let us stay in it), I brought my mountain bike and went for a ride Monday night, and Tuesday and Wednesday night I went for a couple of hikes and found a neat little stream and made a few photographs. Once I get a scanner I can finally start putting up all the TONS of new photographs I’ve made in the last year or so.

I apologize (to anyone that happens to even look at this blog) for the lack of photography-relevant posts lately. And for the lack of any kind of posts at all, for that matter. I don’t really have any kind of excuse, other than the fact that I’ve gotten blog-updating-lazy. Nothing really exciting has happened since the purchase of my Pathfinder. Except for me finding dirt roads all over the place north of Heber on the way to Park City. One of them takes you down off the highway (Highway 40, FYI) and parallels the Provo River and below the bridges of the highway that spans the river. I went exploring Monday, and ended up going down that road. I’m kind of certain that anyone who isn’t Fish and Game or BLM isn’t supposed to go there after looking/researching the area a bit more–it’s all part of the Provo River Restoration Project. Despite the sentance in one of the posts about the Pathfinder, about me being an environment destroying SUV owner, after I realized just where I was, I got out of there. But I did manage to make a photograph of the bridges. I’m excited to see how it turns out…Just gotta get another batch of negatives developed…Ughh. I need a DLR.

Anyway, here a few kind of old, and really poor pictures I snapped with my camera phone a few weeks ago bouldering in Rock Canyon. Enjoy, or…whatever.

I went out car shopping today and found a 98 Pathfinder. All the financing stuff should be finished on Monday or Tuesday. I’m real excited to get it. Going through Provo Canyon and up to Park City won’t be so bad this winter.
Winter is pretty well on it’s way, I think. All the mountains here got a pretty good dusting last night. I think Park City is high enough that it saw some of the dust as well, which might be bad news for us framers. We’re about done with the roof of the house we’re working on, and then we get to finish framing up the interior walls in the upstairs and finish out the basement, and finish the porch and deck (which are quite large). And then we have another house to start that will be ready in 2 or so weeks. This new company is really good. It has been a good switch. Except for the coming winter. We could do without the several feet of snow that will be on the ground soon.

So a while back, I said I was redesigning my website. It’s still in progress, but things are coming together. For some reason I can’t renew the domain I had (andrewduncanphoto.net), so the new website will have a new address www.20photographs.com (and .net, .info, and .biz…GoDaddy had a good deal for all four domains). There is a wierd reason why I chose that name. All the other domains I could think of were taken, (this is something occuring across all types of websites, not only photography web sites/galleries) so I started thinking of other names with numbers in the address, such as 4×5photography, or 5×7photography (the two formats I work in), but scratched that idea, because I plan on getting a Nikon D200 as soon as I can afford it, and 4×5 and 5×7 will no longer be my main method of original image capture. Wednesday at work, I was toying with these new URLs, and 20photographs.com popped in my head, and kept popping up. So I started thinking if I should limit each gallery/project to 20photographs, but scratched that idea, but I still liked how 20photographs sounded, so I decided to go with it. Pretty soon the site will be up.
Oh, and I’ve requested an invite to Vox, a blogging service still in beta testing. I heard the owner of the company on Inside the Net, and it sounded like a very powerful service. Hopefully I get the invite. If I do, my blog will be changing locations as well. I’ll keep you all posted.

Edit: I got my invite to Vox this morning (much sooner than expected). My new blog address photographicdepartures.vox.com.