Category Archives: Events

The 2010 Denver Chalk Art Festival

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This weekend I had a bit of time to myself — my wife and daughter were still in Arizona (I had to get home early for work), the weather was nice, and I’ve got no shortage of camera gear.

So when I could take a break from my honey-do list, I decided to make some quick trips into downtown Denver to check out the Denver Chalk Art Festival. It’s an annual, free, two-day street painting festival — with more than 200 artists turning 3 blocks of downtown streets into an open air chalk art museum.

And boy, are these folks ever good! Here you can see one hard at work on the details of her creation (BTW, there’s a contest associated with the festival — if you like the image and have a Facebook account, please leave a comment on its contest page):

Skin tones

I’m not sure if this one had an Avatar tie-in or not, but the skin tone’s about right (its contest page is here):

Feeling blue

This next one was one of my favorites (it’s by Dawn Morrison Wagner, check out her web site!), even before it was finished:

Becoming Music

This is a portrait of Music, somewhat in the style of Alphonse Mucha (its contest page is here).

And then of course, there’s this bit of excellent advice on living your life:

Great advice

More to come…

A little “light” entertainment

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If you ever get to Hawaii (in particular, if you ever get to the island of Oahu), chances are you’ll wind up stopping by the Polynesian Cultural Center. It’s the #1 paid attraction in the state, after all. An adjunct of the BYU-Hawaii campus, the PCC serves a cluster of purposes — entertainment, helping college-age kids from across the Pacific pay for college, and providing some cross-cultural education.

Granted, the displays of polynesian culture at the PCC are “cleaned up” a bit (as you might expect given the circumstances), but for most visitors it’s at least a quick way to get exposure to a slice of Polynesia they wouldn’t see otherwise. The after-dinner show is also a great way to get practice photographing flaming torches:

A little

I was more than a little surprised that this shot didn’t require much noise cleanup — the torches do a great job of lighting the entertainer (just had a bit of noise in the darker background). BTW, this is a shot from the “Ha: Breath of Life” show. Great stuff for the kids…

Rolling out

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Living as we do in the metro Denver area, we’ve been keeping an eye on the ongoing build-out (called FasTracks) of our light rail system. This past weekend, RTD shut down 6th Avenue (an arterial highway through town) in one section so a light rail bridge could be rolled over it — apparently the first time in the U.S. that this has been done with a bridge of this size (286 feet long, 600 tons).

My daughter and I were at loose ends Saturday morning, so we went out to see the goings on:

Rolling out

OK, I wouldn’t call it a particularly dynamic event (the construction folks allocated 30 hours for the rollout, but were done in half the time), but it was fun to swing by and see a taste of what’s to come in about 2 more years. Here’s a better view from the east:

Bridge under way

And one from the Union St. overpass looking along 6th Avenue toward downtown (i.e., to the east):

Towards downtown

It’s so weird seeing this normally busy highway shutdown like this… RTD also put up a time lapse video of the process, it condenses all the activity into a minute of video:

Poised

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A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:

Poised

I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:

1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).

2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.

3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.

So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).