Aaron Barker’s Photoblog

A project that I have worked on for the last year at work has finally launched.  The Welfare Operations Training site.

When creating the site I wanted to use the iconic Welfare Square grain silos located next to I-15 in Utah as a recognizable banner on the front page.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find any good photos of the silos in the library of approved media.  So I decided to go take the picture myself

Here it is in place on the front page of the site.

We also needed a photo of a computer in our “How to Use the Site” section and again, none of the images I had access to would work as I wanted a white computer (not the norm) that wouldn’t stand out so much.  So I went to the home studio on my white seamless paper, and did a little photoshoot with my own computer hardware.

The LCD is actually a black Dell 2001FP that I did some fairly heavy Photoshopping on to make white/grey.

So while they are my photos, they were taken on the company dime (I signed over full rights to them).  But it’s still cool to have my work out on an official site of the church.

I am grateful I had the skills and equipment to get the photos I wanted.

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Made the annual visit to Provo High School to view the fireworks at the Stadium of Fire.

While waiting for the show to begin I was checking my twitter feed and saw Scott Jarvie mention his firework photo tips from 2008.  One of the tips was that he uses his telephoto to zoom in on shapes.  I didn’t exactly follow his advice, but it did make me zoom in in general to get more details then the “big picture” type view I have done in the past.  I definitely liked the different look it gave me.

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During a recent family vacation to southern California to attend a family reunion, I thought I would beef up the selection on my LDS Temple Photography site and take pictures of the temples along the way.  Sometimes it would just have to be at the time we were passing by them, and so the lighting wasn’t the best, but something is better then nothing I guess.

The temples we visited were:

1. St George Utah
2. Las Vegas Nevada
3. Los Angeles California
4. Newport Beach California
5. Redlands California

It was interesting to see temples from various eras.  St George being one of the originals.  Los Angeles being from the 1950’s.  Las Vegas from when there was kind of a “lots of spires” wave going on. Newport Beach and Redlands from the “mini” temple category.

We first visited Los Angeles at the worst part of the day with stark lighting from straight above (the “passiny by” reference from above).  After a visit to the beach, I steered the family back for a second visit just at dusk and was pleased to get my favorite temple shot of the vacation (above).

The one I was the most surprised by was Newport Beach.  The grounds were just gorgeous.  Rivaling Temple Square in my opinion.  Sadly there was a heavy smog that morning so it has a nice grey sky to backdrop it.

Of all the places I expected to have nice fluffy white clouds in the background… the desert of Las Vegas was not it.  Just as we turned the corner where you can see Las Vegas for the first time there was this rain storm pounding the whole valley (yeah, crazy).  It hadn’t yet made it to the eastern edge where the temple was and by the time I got there the leading clouds were in the background.  It was perfect.

It’s very difficult to get a good shot of the whole temple.  It now has many mature trees on a smallish lot.  Most of the pictures I saw online were from when the palm trees were brand new.

Redlands is a bit special for my family as it is the temple a city away from where my mom grew up, and where most of my extended family currently resides.  I love the palm trees that surround it and act as natural spires.

Last and certainly not least, is St George.  Again a family favorite as some great-great-great-great-grandfather helped to build it and apparently has a hand print in one of the upper window wells.  It’s odd how the little casual shot you can take on the way into the grounds can end up your favorite, over the ones you walk around forever to find “just the right angle”.  It sure was nice of that tree to grow as a natural frame like that.  A touch cheesy maybe, but you gotta have one of those every now and then

Many thanks to my family for putting up with my little side trips.  It was cool to visit 5 temples in 5 days, and it made for a memorable portion of our trip.

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