Spring at 7,000 Feet Above Sea Level

My wife Amy has been praying for snow. Apparently someone's listening as we've had and Alaskan storm system sitting over our mountain town for the past week. Supposedly it is going to be moving on by the weekend. It makes for pretty pictures but I'm more than ready for spring to arrive and stick around.
I learned how to shoot in the dark . Not playing with the snow downtown but in the local library photographing kids watching a 3D movie in a room to dark for my camera to autofocus. It was also too dark for manual focus. I had told the editors that I would send in a photo from the event for the front page so it was time to teach myself how to shoot in the dark. This was the first time that I used the LCD display to walk my focus in. I think it worked out pretty well.

This image would have been impossible with the Nikon's I was shooting with last year. I shot this a 6400 asa with a 1/2 second exposure hand-held. It's a testament to the Canon 5D Mark II and an 80 - 200mm image stabilized lens. This camera simply makes light where there is none.

Sleepless in Flagstaff...

My daughter Charlotte was sick all week with an ear infection from a yucky cold that was punctuated by ectoplasm sneezes and lots of difficulty breathing. When she gets sick like this my wife Amy soothes her to sleep. When it's my turn I often resort to driving her around town. Something about riding next to me in the front seat of a truck with a quarter million miles on the clock seems to help her get to her happy land of dreams.
It was 3 a.m. and I was driving up San Francisco Street when I glanced through the window of the Mad I and saw this girl dozing in a booth waiting for a ride home. The image of her resting against the bench seemed such a poetic reflection of my weary drive through the town I love with my own tired girl. I grabbed a camera, shot a few frames and meandered home through the empty streets.
I'm thinking that this will be the first image of a new personal project.