Photo Friday: Orange Utah Glad I Posted These Photos

After the break: don’t dread going to work, sponsor a college football bowl game, HR doesn’t like lasers in eyeballs.

I hope you all have enjoyed the Athletics component of the Olympics as much as I have this week. Gymnastics was really fun, but Athletics is always my favorite. A lot of events have gone chalk this week, but there have been some real upsets, many of which were to the benefit of Team USA. Hocker in the 1500m and Rooks in the steeple were both huge medals for the US and extremely exciting races.

After a week of bronze, silver and gold, I want to put a little focus on orange.

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Photos

These photos are all overwhelmingly orange, but they all feel so different to me.

Photo 1

Bluff, UT, 2024

The first image is a soft and chalky orange. The balance of the lush greenery along the riverbed zig-zagging through the canyon gives this image a lot more life than I would expect from an image of the desert. When I look at this image, I don’t immediately start feeling brutal heat like I do in other images from the same area. The patchy sunlight gives the image a less harsh feel too, and I’m always a sucker for cloud shadows in landscapes.

I thought about removing the power lines along the top of the canyon but decided to leave them in. I’m always torn on whether or not to leave the evidence of humanity in landscapes like this, and I don’t have a rule one way or the other. Sometimes I feel more documentarian-oriented and leave them in because they were there and other times I just take them out because it feels like they spoil everything.

Original:

A note on the originals included in all of my posts: I shoot in a raw format, which means that the images that come out of the camera generally look much less saturated than they would if I took them as JPGs.

The camera does no processing on raw images and keeps as much of the light and color data as possible so that photographers have more latitude in editing later on, which makes the files pretty massive. It also means that you have to edit every photo you take to get any sort of finished image.

Shooting in JPG results in smaller file sizes, but it does that by cutting out what it believes to be extraneous data and adding its own interpretation of the color before saving the file to the card. It also results in files that may not need any post-processing. These originals are unedited JPG exports of the raw images from the camera.

Photo 2

Bluff, UT, 2024

You might hate this one. It’s a lot more stylized than I usually do, but I applied some of my normal edits to this photo and it came out looking just about like this and I liked the effect. It’s not true-to-life, but it feels very dramatic. My normal edits affected this photo differently than others likely due to the close proximity of the brightest areas right next to the darkest areas throughout the images, as well as the direction that the light comes in.

When I first saw the photo like this, it evoked some kind of an old Hollywood western film feeling in me; like the early days of color film, maybe? The light is the real star of the show here, and to compound that, I brought the blacks up some, so the darkest colors are never completely black. You can still see the red in them. The directionality of the light looks almost artificial, and I think that contributes to the feeling that this image might have been taken on a soundstage instead of at the top of a mountain.

Original:

Photo 3

Goosenecks State Park

This was one of those photos that was hard for me to find the right crop. What I loved about the image, other than color of the rich, hot dirt, was the way the layers worked together to create a pattern that almost looked like scales on a giant dragon. Finding the right place to crop the image on the top and bottom proved to be a real challenge, and I’m still not sure that I nailed it. The angle at which I took the photo gave it the pattern I love, but it also created the cropping issue.

This photo is almost overloaded with color. The area had gotten a lot of rain before we got there, so the scrub everywhere was a lush green. The hills weren’t about to give up the spotlight, though, and the orange showed up so brilliantly that it verged on red. I did give it a shot in black-and-white since it had such strong lines, but that version just couldn’t compete with this one.

Original:

Which photo do you like the most? What would you have done differently? Let me know with a comment!

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Links

1. Advice for Going Back to Work When You Don’t Want to by The Monday Morning Coach

So let the discontent go, but hang on tightly to the experiences you gain every day with gratefulness and appreciation. So try putting less emphasis on “how things used to be” or how much better they could be. Appreciate the past as they are experiences that molded you into the teacher or coach who can take on a potentially problematic year. And imagine how much better things could be with the power of change you wield.

I feel like I perpetually live in a state of “things used to be better” or “I wish things were better” even though my life is perfectly good as it is now. This piece was a good reminder to live in the present and focus on what I can control now instead of trying to find things to be dissatisfied with.

2. Extra Points Is Sponsoring a Bowl Game by Matt Brown of Extra Points

One of the things that I’ve come to learn while running Extra Points is that a great way to understand how a particular thing works…is to do that thing.

So when I wanted to better understand how the NIL marketplace worked… I signed a bunch of athletes to NIL deals.

When I wanted to better understand how college sports video games were made…we made a computer game.

And today, I’m thrilled to announce our most ambitious endeavor yet.

We’re sponsoring our own bowl game. Seriously.

Introducing the Extra Points Bowl The Extra Points Bowl, part of the Opendorse Bowl Series, will be played on Nov 23, 2024, at the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, right next to the NFL Hall of Fame.

Matt Brown writes the wonderful Extra Points newsletter about the business of college sports. If you’re a college sports nerd enthusiast, you’ll get a lot of value out of his newsletter too. He also did some great reporting on the College Football 25 video game development process.

But more importantly: He’s sponsoring a college football bowl game this season! I don’t know anything about how to put on a bowl game or what the sponsorship naming rights process is for one, but I’m extremely excited to find out!

3. How I Got My Laser Eye Injury by Phil B of Funranium Labs

It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.

I cannot pull out one single part of this post that doesn’t rely on some other part of it to be funny, but I assure you that it’s a quick read and it’s absolutely worth the time. You’ll laugh the whole way through.

4. LA 2028, baby! by Tyler

I appreciate that Tyler didn’t even do yards. Straight to feet and inches. I laughed about this one all day long.