So this is just straight-up cool. My dad has his own photo web site that you have to visit!

About mid-career, he basically stopped taking pictures all together because he got too busy, but a few years ago my parents moved to an island off the coast of Seattle and prepared for retirement. My dad took a job that required a lot less time in the office, and he’s been devoting a lot of his spare time back to photography. Recently, he scored a job as a stringer at the local paper up there to the tune of $15 a week. W00t! Now that his shots are appearing all over the place, I decided to give him a web site for Christmas. It’s yet another rip-off of my editorial site, so it might look familiar, but the images on his site are better.

So check it out. I think there’s some super classic stuff there. It’s at http://www.davidweltonphoto.com.

Back in Cali kickin it with the crew. Miss it here. Good times, great friends. Toots got his first chance to visit one of our favorite places on earth, the stunning mountaintop boulder field at Lizard’s Mouth, home to the best moderate sandstone bouldering anywhere. And actually thanks to our buddy Bernd, a bunch of new hard lines have gone up in the last year.

Here we are on one of them, an unnamed route overlooking the ocean. We spent sunset here taking pictures.

If you want to know how it’s done, I used a really fast prime lens at f/1.4 coupled with a single flash bouncing off a gold reflector disk. Reflector was pointing up from ground level, flash was triggered via a PocketWizard. Very low ISO (100) allowed me to get the dark blue sky at 125th of a second. It also let me have a very noiseless image. I passed off the camera later on and Bernd grabbed it to take the last two shots, one of Steve and one of me.

Quite possibly the highlight of the day was seeing Alicia’s parents’ chihuahua Rosie wearing Bernd’s kid’s diaper. Finn, Bernd and Hjortis’ little infant, was nice and warm and had a spare diaper. Rosie was freezing and had nothing. So… What happens when you have a spare diaper and a freezing chihuahua? Diaper Dog. It’s was the only solution.