Lois and Lon on a vacation!!!

This year, Lois and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary on the 9th of September. We were very busy in our studio and decided to celebrate the occasion by taking a trip in October. After looking at many locations we decided that we would like to go to Jackson, Wyoming. We chose this for a couple of reasons. Both of us had visited Jackson when we were kids and had memories of those trips. We also had wanted to purchase a piece of artwork for our anniversary. Jackson, just happens to be the third largest art market in the US. So this is what we did. Here are some of our vacation pictures. They aren't real good, because, well, I was on vacation. So there.

Here we are in Yellowstone National Park. It snowed.


This is the famous Elk Antler Archway in the center of town. There is one on each corner of the city park.

This is the Elk Preserve. Each winter 7000 Elk will winter in this preserve. It was right across the road from the cabin we stayed in. We did see three elk there one morning.

Here is our very dirty car parked behind our 'cabin' just outside of Jackson.
This is what we saw when we walked out the front door of our 'cabin'. There is a creek at the bottom of the picture out of the frame.

Here are some pictures of the Grand Teton Mountain. Grand Teton is supposedly from the French meaning large breast. It figures the french would name a mountain range that.


"Under any light, the mountains are wondrous and sublime. Cold and pulseless must be the heart of him who can view such a scene with indifference"
Alfred Jacob Miller (artist) 1837


This guy was right on the side of the road. I got out and took his picture with a 'normal' lens and then realized that he was about the size of our car and decided to retreat and put my car between him and me.

This is something we don't see much in San Diego. Big clouds and a flat plain.
Enough of the photos. Lois and I are a strange pair. We enjoy each others company every day at work and always have a good time when we travel. This trip was great. We ended up purchasing a beautiful bronze of a mountain lion in a tree.

Rendezvous!

The Mountain Men of the fur trade era (1815-1840) are an important part of the history of our country. They also would gather together once a year for several weeks and trade their furs, buy supplies and have one heck of a party. Many of the things they did at these rendezvous' relate to fun things that the Boys Scouts can really get into.

Each year Shelley, myself and a strange group of people put on the Blackfoot Fort Mountain Man Rendezvous for older Boy Scouts in our local San Diego Council. Following are some images from that great event:


These boys have earned great skinning knives by being the 'Best Dressed' mountain men among the scouts.


There is a lot of competition and skills that take place. Above is a mountain man teaching the young men how to set traps.

Much of the competition is team building. Of course we don't tell the scouts that they are learning team building. This is a travois race. They have to lash together these poles and drag an injured member of their team around a course.


These scouts are competing in the popular hawk throwing. Hawks being short for tomahawk.


They have a fun relay race in canoes. The object is to get around a course without getting their 'powder' wet. Powder being gunpowder.

This year we had 53 units register. About 350 participants. We allow the adults to participate in most of the activities. This is a rare event when we have one adult for every two scouts that come.


It takes a bunch of dedicated adults to put this kind of an event on. These folks are a combination of scouters and mountain man reenactors. See if you can spot yours truly and Shelley.

Merry Mary 2

Well, for the third time Mary has worked for us through the summer and then goes back to her real life. Usually she would head back to school at BYU. Last summer she skipped a semester and headed to Guatemala, where she volunteered at an orphanage for four months. This time she is headed for Buenos Aires, Argentina for eighteen months. She will be serving a mission for her Church; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon).

She will be missed. Usually it is in mid September that we start looking for her in the studio and she is gone. She has that ability to bring peace and happiness wherever she is. She also makes a great and forgiving target for the red rubber balls I keep in the studio for sneak attacks. Here is a few images from this summer:

This is Mary re-doing the tile floor in our kitchen area of the studio. It was cool when she stuck one of these 18" tiles to the bottom of her foot.

Above is Mary on a search and destroy mission to eradicate another spider ecosystem.

Below is Mary doing two jobs at once, painting a prop sign while babysitting Shelley's (Queen Denizen of the Digital Dungeon) baby.

This next photo was in my blog on the red shoe project. Not only did Mary have one of the best ideas, she become the model for the the Tight Rope Red Shoes.


She will be missed, but we are excited for her as she starts this next chapter of her life. People like Mary are hard to find and they always leave good memories.

Asphalt: not a tennis term

Boy what a bad week to have the landlord decide to repave our parking lot. We had an ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers, asmp.org) seminar scheduled in our studio for Saturday. One week ahead of time we get notice that we will not have access to our building on Saturday. Well, that's wasn't going to work! With one sorta polite email to our landlord, we had this guy form the construction company show up at my studio. Man, what a great guy. He jumped through hoops to get our parking lots finished ahead of schedule. So, here on Friday afternoon, I sat on the couch in our lobby and shot these marvelous action shots.





When a situation arises that has difficult ramifications for others, it is nice to find people that are willing to go that extra step to make things better. Our seminar was in trouble. How to get the 40+ people into the studio? This one supervisor took it upon himself to remedy our problem. People were able to park in our parking lot.

I like to think that this is the way that I personally act, but also the way we choose to run our business. Thanks to Patrick McDonald who gave a damn.

If The Red Shoe Fits...

When we have an open day in the studio we work on an on going project involving a pair of red shoes. Yesterday, was the first day we had in several weeks. (This is a good thing!). We sit down as a group and talk about ideas for the red shoes. This particular idea was Mary's so it seemed fitting that she become the tight rope model. (Merry Mary, is our intrepid studio 'Jill of all trades'.) It also helped that she is the only one out of the five of us that the shoes fit.

The steel cable is about three feet off of the floor. First we tried having her sit on a ladder and that didn't work. So we placed a painters board across two ladders and that worked well. She is sitting about 6' off the ground. We shot about three dozen photos until we got the one that we liked. This is the finished image:

So far we have shot seven photos with the red shoes. Our plan is to shoot twelve different versions. I will post more on this blog in a couple of weeks.

Getting Away

We have been really busy in the studio the past month. Not complaining. In these economic times, you don't want to be complaining about being busy. But, you do need to get away sometimes and clean out your brain and re-energize yourself.

For me, it's primitive camping. I was able to get away for six days and nights. Great fun. Primitive camping is camping with equipment that was used before 1840. Sleeping on the ground with just a couple blankets. Cooking over a fire and so forth. Of course, I had an ice chest full of good food, but it was always out of sight. Here are a few pictures of my camp and the area I was camping. (I was just to tired of shooting pictures to take too many on my vacation)


Besides camping, I was able to shoot all of my several blackpowder guns, shoot my primitive long bow and have some great conversation with friends around the campfires.

MacKenzie

I could write some thoughts on the cool stuff we have been doing in the studio, but for some reason all that pales in comparison with having our fifth grandchild: MacKenzie Jackson. Everyone that comes to our studio knows Shelley, our daughter, and head digital artist. MacKenzie is Shelley and Daniel's first child.

She was born on March 9th and weighed a whopping 5 pounds 4 ounces. She is perfect in every way. She is just very petite! We are so happy to have her in our family. Shelley is doing well and as expected, is becoming a wonderful mom. Here are some more pictures: