On the way to a press screening at the Gateway Megaplex this month, I took an amusing picture of a flight of stairs that led out from the parking garage. I say, "amusing" because for about 20 years these stairs were an escalator, and in the time since I began attending screenings in 2013, more often than not it seemed like they were closed for repairs. At some point in the last few years management must have decided enough was enough, ripped out the escalator, and put in concrete.
The sight of the stairs makes me laugh, but I'm still not sure how to interpret their story. In one way, it comes off as a story of giving up, of letting go of the "nice" thing. A more positive interpretation would focus on how simplifying our lives can eliminate unnecessary hassles.
I have similar feelings about 2024. I can point to some genuine high points, and I'm still wincing from some low points, but I'm still not sure what I'll take from the year altogether. As usual, what follows will lean into the highlights, more to reinforce a needed sense of gratitude rather than to fulfill any strange desire to convince readers I'm living my best life. But I do sense that I'll remember 2024 as a challenging year, which makes its tender mercies all the more valuable. Read on if you're up for the ride, and as always, you can link here if you just want to look at the pictures.
W I N T E R
2023 finished with such a flurry that I spent a good chunk of January trying to catch up on unfinished business. Rather than head out on new shoots, I finished editing images from Christmas displays I'd photographed over the holidays, and watched a range of movies to prepare for the annual Utah Film Critics Association vote. At the same time, I kicked off a pair of English courses for Spring Semester, and kept serving as an ordinance worker at the Bountiful Temple. Overall, the biggest news of early 2024 was the return of church basketball; every Thursday from January through February, I ran the hardwood for the 19th Ward in our first season since before Covid.
After a fun holiday season, I was happy to see Winter 2024 deliver more opportunities to hang out with my nieces, whether skating at the Bountiful Ice Ribbon, playing pickup games of Mario Kart, or painting ceramics at a studio in Farmington. Those activities kept me busy until my first travel shoot of the year. Early in the morning of February 1st, I got on a plane in Salt Lake and set out for Nashville, Tennessee, where the Cheetahman was attending an event for his Rockagator brand. Over three days I took hundreds of pictures around town as I walked Broadway, attended the Grand Ole Opry, and ate everything from gumbo to pulled pork sandwiches to Nashville Hot Chicken. Then over two more days I got scattered images of America's Heartland as Randy and I drove 1,600 miles home in a Sprinter Van.
In spite of some scattered snowstorms, Winter 2024 was pretty mild compared to 2023, and coming so soon after my Nashville trip, I decided to stick around town when Weber's spring break arrived a week into March. There was still plenty to keep me occupied between traditional Super Bowl and Oscar parties and other get-togethers with family and friends. It took a while to get shooting again, but as I made my way through the month a few casual efforts kept the 2024 portfolio growing.
It was bleary and overcast as March closed in on its Easter weekend finish line, but winter's finale got a burst of color when Steve and I drove down to the Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork to photograph the annual Holi Festival. It had been twelve years since my last visit, and the crowd had thinned from its pre-pandemic heights, but the enthusiastic spirit and celebratory visuals still made the trip worthwhile.
S P R I N G
The Holi dust had barely settled when I set out on a belated Spring Break road trip. After exploring more ambitious options like flying back east to see the eclipse in Cleveland or driving out to California's Mono Lake, I eventually settled on a modest loop through Southern Utah. Since my trip lined up with the official K-12 Spring Break for most of Utah's school districts, I avoided popular destinations like Zion or Bryce Canyon, and pieced together an itinerary of lesser-known targets. After a shaky start, a visit to the Cedar City Temple kicked off two days of successful shoots that included Gunlock Falls, the Kanab Sand Caves, and Kodachrome Basin State Park. I capped things off on Friday with a fun drive up Scenic Highway 12 and a pause in Manti to photograph the crowd lined up outside the temple for its spring Open House.
Spring was officially up and running by the time I got back from Southern Utah. Soon after my return I swung by the State Capitol to try out a few new angles on the blossoms, and I got some fun pictures up at the Layton Temple Open House with Steve. Around the same time, I was released from my position as the 19th Ward's Executive Secretary, and gave a talk on temple service in sacrament meeting.
April also meant it was time to wrap up Spring Semester at Weber State, and I spent much of the month getting my English students through their final argument papers. Soon after posting the final grades, I got some pictures of an old friend who was finishing her Master's in Social Work, and along with a cosplay shoot at the Valley Fair Megaplex prior to the "Furiosa" screening, Spring 2024 put some fun people in front of my camera.
After a quick transition from Spring to Summer Semester, another old friend contacted me with a job. Years after our time in grad school at Utah State University, Matt Hansen had taken a position with Salt Palace Catering, and in early May he reached out about doing some artwork for a tasting room at the event center. My cousin Jim had contacted me with a similar project for his financial planning office in Louisville, Kentucky earlier in the year, and it was encouraging to see my work hanging on walls rather than lost in the shuffle of social media.
S U M M E R
The new season arrived a week and a half into June when I joined my neighbors Milo and Georgia Paskett for an off-road adventure in Southern Utah. Over three days we explored the Utah Badlands around Factory Butte, took in the Valley of the Gods near the Four Corners area, and even stumbled onto a curious spot called Little Egypt just south of Hanksville. It was our first excursion since a loop through Cathedral Valley in 2019, and I enjoyed spending time with such excellent friends.
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| Honestly, "Little Egypt" looks a lot more like, "Little Goblin Valley" to me. |
June also proved to be a significant month in a spiritual sense. After several years of working with Bishop Craig Adams, my friend Keith Harten was called as his successor, and I was called to teach the 17/18 year old Sunday School class. Up at the temple, I spent the month officiating endowment sessions, including one attended by the Cheetahman, who was with me the first time I went through the temple in 1995. Then just before June crossed the finish line, Steve and I joined my old mission buddy Rob Nixon for lunch, which gave the power lunch series a late jump start for 2024.
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| Steve Anderson was the first of my former teachers I featured in the Power Lunch project... |
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| ...and Ken Zeeman became the second a few weeks later. |
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| My neighbor Jesse Booth is an accomplished writer and a regular at FanX. |
Even when I wasn't tooling around off-road or having lunch with friends, Summer 2024 offered plenty of activities and photo ops, starting with a stunning June sunset out at the Farmington Bay Bird Refuge. After running the Centerville Freedom Run 5K with my friend Tyler, I photographed the Kaysville 4th of July parade, and the next night I saw my sister take the stage with one of my nieces for Kaysville's production of The Music Man.
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| The Cheetahman's "Trek fashion" looked good in the rocking chair. |
Only days after wrapping her Music Man performances, Katie joined me for July's biggest event: four days of food and sights in my Windy City second home. From Wednesday to Saturday we ate at restaurants like Giordano's, took in the city from the Sears Tower Skydeck, and enjoyed a show at the Blue Chicago. We also included first-time experiences, like a river-guided architecture tour and a walking ghosts tour in The Loop. After a Day 4 lunch with my longtime friend Cherenia, we capped off the trip by explaining some Gospel principles to our inquisitive Uber driver on the way to the airport.
The only problem was, we hadn't really capped off the trip.
While we were tying up our itinerary in the city, a worldwide IT shutdown was wreaking havoc with airline systems at O'Hare, and Saturday night our return flight became the latest casualty in a wave that stranded thousands of travelers in US airports. After spending that first night in the terminal, we set up home base at a nearby Holiday Inn, and spent the next three days working through the arduous process of getting home. Through persistence, the assistance of local and not-so-local friends and family, and pure divine providence, we finally arrived home safe on the morning of Utah's Pioneer Day holiday. After completing a stressful and straining ordeal that demanded near-constant soul-searching, Brigham Young's prophetic declaration "this is the right place" never felt so poignant.
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| My only fireworks shoot of 2024. |
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| My nomination for the most contented man of 2024. |
Once we were finally back from Chicago, it was time to shift into Summer Semester's final grind, and while guiding my students through their argument papers, I continued to photograph summer events like a West Bountiful car show, a hike up Farmington Canyon, and an intense wildfire-enhanced sunset. The late summer's undisputed highlight was a hat trick of spiritual events that lined up one weekend in early August. On Friday I attended Rob Nixon's sealing in the Ogden Temple, on Saturday I completed over two years of service with a final ordinance worker shift at the Bountiful Temple, and on Sunday I drove to Saratoga Springs to attend a missionary homecoming for my buddy Brian's son Noah. By the time I took my camera downtown on the last day of August, Fall Semester was already a week old, but catching the warm glow of the setting sun behind some North Salt Lake refineries felt like a fitting capstone for a memorable summer.
F A L L
As 2024's third quarter opened, the spiritual tone that highlighted August continued into September as I attended my third niece's baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In addition to speaking in the program, I did some portraits for her up at the Layton Temple. A little later in the season, the trend continued when I handled some missionary portraits for Randy's daughter Olivia, who'd been called to serve in the same mission where her mother joined the church as a teenager. Combined with some work for friends and neighbors, Fall 2024 offered a number of portrait opportunities, and as always, I was grateful to have people choose me over so many options.
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| I asked Maggie Grace to write, "following U2 is totally not worth it" on her 8x10. |
Naturally, the best images of the season came from my forays into Utah's canyons in search of Autumn leaves. A sunrise run along the Alpine Loop and some unconventional efforts up Millcreek Canyon captured the spirit of the season, but an unexpected moose encounter up over Guardsman Pass in September may have delivered my best shot of 2024.
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Around mid-October, an already busy Fall semester at Weber State got even busier when I returned to campus for my first face-to-face class in two years. Looking back, teaching an accelerated 2nd Block course I had never taught before to mostly international students from Nepal was a perfect example of running faster than you have strength, but I still found the energy to keep pace on a favorite photo project: the Signs of Our Times. Thanks to the presidential election, there was plenty of drama in 2024, but along the way I came across some other signs that seemed historically important.
H O L I D A Y S
The arrival of the 2024 Holiday Season felt gave me something to look forward to in the midst of the fall chaos, even if at times it felt like a boost of nitrous oxide to an already dangerous ride. Things got going a few days before Thanksgiving, when I drove up to Ogden to see Niece #2 perform in the Nutcracker only a few months removed from her debut in The Music Man. Thanksgiving dinner went by the book for the most part, but the real surprise was playing in my first Turkey Bowl in six years the previous afternoon. Father Time has made me more of a possession receiver than a deep threat in my '40s, but I still caught enough passes to make the joint 19th Ward Young Men/Elder's Quorum event one of my favorites for 2024.
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| The game went so well I never stepped out to take pictures. Instead I shot my cleats once I got home. |
By the time the turkey hit the table, Fall Semester was powering full-speed into its final push, but in the middle of the madness, a simple text message made the 2024 holidays a little more bittersweet. My friend Ken Brown, the witty self-appointed emcee to TC Christensen's annual Oscar Parties, had passed after a 22-year fight with leukemia. His funeral the following Thursday morning turned out to be one of the most uplifting experiences of a difficult stretch, as well as a reminder that Ken was one of the funniest men I had ever met.
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| Luckily my only picture of Ken (on the right) managed to capture his deadpan sense of humor. |
Going into the holidays, my plan was to balance the "to-do" stuff with enough fun activities to keep Christmas from sneaking up on me, and for 2024, that was especially important. My Fall Semester finale was exhausting, amplified by another push to screen enough films to complete my UFCA ballot. Then a bad head cold arrived two days after wrapping up my final grading and drove any chance of a pre-Christmas road trip over the cliff. I still made a point of attending choir concerts, going out to eat with friends, and taking pictures of Christmas lights, but altogether it was a challenging season.
One thing that helped was the completion of two interconnected projects. Back in the summer, when I decided to step down from my assignment at the Bountiful Temple, I set a goal to attend four new temples by the end of the year. I got the project started with a session at the Layton Utah Temple in October, and later I added Saratoga Springs and Taylorsville to my list. Then, the day after Christmas, I drove down to Utah County to attend the Provo City Center Temple for the first time.
My temple goal paired nicely with a modest home improvement project. After repainting the stairwell back in June, I decided to fill the space with a collage of my favorite family photos, and two days before Christmas I complemented the collage with a framed picture of the Salt Lake Temple I shot in December of 2014. Coming ten years after my dad's passing, the effort took on an extra sense of poignance, and gave 2024 a needed feeling of completion.
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| A week after my session at Saratoga Springs, I returned with Brian to get some creative pics. |
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| It was raining after my session in Provo, so I tried some options from inside the south annex. |
With those efforts completed, another tradition helped guide the year to a close. Back in 2022 I enhanced my annual blog report with a montage of video clips I took alongside my various shoots that year. 2023 kept up the effort, and now 2024 completes the hat trick. This video was a little harder to put together, largely because I took so many clips to sort through, but in the end I think Frederic Chopin's "Nocturne" put an appropriate tone on a quirky year.
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Back in November, on the way home from the local grocery store that is now open on Sundays, I found another scene that made me laugh. The old Arctic Circle franchise on Orchard Drive had been reduced to a pile of rubble befitting the backdrop of a World War II movie, and surrounded by a temporary chain link fence. But that wasn't the funny part. The funny part was the banner on the fence announcing that the location was closed for "remodeling."
I assume the banner was produced before someone decided they were better off demolishing the building entirely, but the dissonance between the stated message and the evidence of my eyes was still instructive. More often than not in 2024, life's little remodeling projects felt a lot more catastrophic on the inside, and I hope they'll feel more inconsequential looking back. It's been over 28 years since I first heard Elder Hugh B. Brown's most famous address on a cheap Deseret Book audio cassette in Joliet, Illinois, and I'm still learning to trust the divine Gardner.
This year was a little harder than most when it came to focusing on the tender mercies in the midst of the trials, but they were still there. A chance encounter with a photogenic moose. A surprise Gospel discussion with an outgoing UBER driver. Seeing another of my nieces get baptized, or watching an old mission buddy get sealed. Sometimes it just had to be the little things, like a bison burger at Maddox or a September peach from one of the fruit stands down the road, but either way the message was clear: even the tough years have their highlights, and as long as we make it to the next level, I guess it doesn't matter if we take the stairs or a fancy escalator.
Happy New Year everyone, and best wishes for 2025!
