The linking the site for this week is a blog recently changed up from a past f/22 photographer.  Evan Prince is a photographer from Austin, Texas whose blog provides information about photography events on going on in Austin as well as updates on his work.

Overnight in Denver snow fell leaving a nice winter scene.  Seeing the snow start to fall on Saturday evening, I planned to wake up early to get out to Washington Park prior to sunrise and see how it had been transformed.  It was quiet in the park and as I headed to a tree which I found almost a year ago a slight chill was present but the beauty of the snow covered surroundings quickly made it go away.  I photographed this tree once again from the original position and prior to heading elsewhere in the park I decided to try a different view of the tree from what I had photographed before.

The image below was converted to black and white to help show the mood and feeling on this Sunday morning in the park.

More images from Washington Park may be found in the Denver gallery.

Happy New Year from Denver, Colorado.

Denver, Colorado Skyline

The last image from the Twelve Images of 2008 is from the month of December, and titled through the sky.  Earlier in the month I headed out near the airport and photographed the light trails through the sky.  There was some cloud cover this evening but it wasn’t too thick allowing the stars to appear with longer exposures.  With the sky so clear and airplanes departing it was a matter of determining what the turn of the aircraft would be and quickly composing a scene.  The other element I noticed was the amount of light pollution you would get trying to include the airport in the shot even though we were easily five miles away from the terminal. The below image is a 30 second exposure of an airplane making a left turn after departure.

Aircraft Departing Denver

The image selected for November 2008 in the Twelve Images of 2008 is not one image but a collection of images.  Once again for the month of November, I photographed each day posting an image taken on the day to the blog.  The series of images is actually quite difficult since it forces you to photograph something new each day no matter what else you have going on in business and the personal life.  You may also find your creativity strained day after day, but this project forces you to work through this to get an image.  The image is below was taken the first day of Thirty Days 2008.

Denver Convention Center

Through January 10, 2009 you may vote for your favorite images from Thirty Days 2008.  Three lucky people will receive a free print, just by voting.

The October 2008 photograph for the Twelve Images of 2008 comes from a trip out to San Francisco, Napa and Sacramento during October.  Mixing some time away with business I was able to photograph for stock as well as some clients during the trip.  While in the Bay Area for a few days visiting my sister and her family, I headed into San Francisco via BART on two of the days and just photographed on the street.  As I had a tilt-shift lens with me the majority of the images taken on the first of the two days was with this lens as shown in the image below.

The tilt-shift lens lets you control the focal plane of the camera different than with a normal lens.  This lens is commonly used for architecture in order to remove any converging lines you may get when photographing a building from below.  In this instance I used the features of the lens to provide some selective focus for this cable car waiting to be turned around and head back to Market Street.

Earlier this month it was announced the Rocky Mountain News is for sale and if a buyer is not found in thirty days the paper may be forced to cease operations.  The viability of the paper moving forward is a concern to the employees of the Rocky who have created the website ‘I want my Rocky‘ which is this weeks linking the week site.

The Rocky Mountain News has had a presence in Denver for almost 150 years (the anniversary is in April) which is almost as long as Denver has been a city.  While it has the history of nearly 150 years the main concern has to do with Denver becoming a one newspaper town.  Currently the Denver Post competes directly with the Rocky forcing both papers to deliver a quality product in the name of competition for readers and even more so advertising dollars.

I am a subscriber to the Post which I receive electronically five days a week with the Rocky being the Saturday paper here in Denver.  This electronic distribution will be the future of the newspapers as they compete with other sources of news in the future and newspapers need to adapt quickly to the changing landscape of news distribution. In Detroit home delivery is being eliminated during the week with the only option on Sunday, also the day with the most ad sales.  Unless the Rocky is purchased and transformed into the new media landscape the losers of the Rocky closing will be the employees of the paper as well as the people of Colorado.  Be sure to check out the linking the week site, “I want my Rocky”.

The buzz around Denver during the month of August was the Democratic National Convention.  The four day event towards the end of the month, did concern some people in Denver as it was unknown what the protesters would bring to the City and County of Denver.  Living close to downtown I made my way towards the main areas outside of the security perimeter on three of the four days of the convention.  Not having a media credential I was not able to get any closer than that.

On the day before the convention started there was a protest at the State Capitol which then marched towards the Pepsi Center.  For this event I was able to join the herd of photographers and get some images of the protest which was mostly peaceful.  Towards the end some members of the protest did try to cause a little trouble, but the protest was kept in control with a large number of police officers who had been trained and ready for anything which may have come up during the convention.  The August 2008 image below of Twelve Images 2008, shows the police presence as the protesters and media swarm the metal barricades.

It was an interesting Boxing Day on Twitter, and if you even checked out your timeline at any time during the day you most likely saw ‘@skydiver‘ appearing.  On this day after Christmas Peter Shankman continued something he started on the day before Christmas with the intention of clearing the piles of SWAG from his office by playing “Twitter Trivia”, however this suddenly took off into a huge event with the help of the PR Rep of OGIO who wanted to give away a bag.  As he wasn’t able to clear his office on Wednesday with all the new products being offered as a result of OGIO, the trivia was extended out until Boxing Day.  When news of the Boxing Day event started to get around late on the day before Christmas, even more companies started to line up with products to donate for the event.  These companies ranged from the large like OGIO and SanDisk to smaller companies like Hooray for the Underdog, and ImageGlow Candles as well as folks offering business coaching and other types of services.  This is just a small sample of what was available and the dollar value was in the five figure amount.  Even through Christmas you would see an occasional tweet by Shankman saying something else had been added to the list.

Starting off in the New York City morning he slowly started offering trivia questions through Twitter.  As I woke up in the Mountain Time Zone I started seeing a few hours of prizes go out the door as he asked various types of trivia.  Some questions could easily be found on Google, another question involved looking at an entry from the lone Help a Reporter Out (HARO) e-mail which went out midday to the subscribers of this free product.  In the afternoon he asked us  to find the 18th word on the Savvy Auntie website, and of course more complex questions as well.  At times people objected to the answer he was looking for saying it was wrong, but in the end he usually prevailed as the Quizmeister.

As I got some work done and watched along during the day it was interesting to see the impact this “Twitter Trivia” had on the community.  You could see the followers for @skydiver grow during the day as word continued to get around of this event taking place.  Peter mentioned on his website earlier in the week he grew by 400 followers in around 30 minutes when the event was first mentioned.  Even though today was a holiday for most, you could easily see a hundred answers come flying in from those playing along and at certain times even more than that.  When giving out two copies of the book “Twitter Means Business” the question to win was what newspaper does the author @jojeda work.  This information was on his Twitter page and I stayed on that page to refresh and watch the number of followers increase over the course of minutes.  If the question pertained to finding something on a website if you jumped to that site it was obvious the spikes in traffic were significant as the sites would crawl at time.  Peter mentioned at the end of the event that he was getting feedback that the traffic jumps were indeed some of the best ever for some businesses offering products.

The one item which changed everything is when @brianshaler connected up Shankman’s apartment with a live video feed about ten hours into the event so you could watch as they dispensed prizes.  All of a sudden the event became even more real, and having just seen EdTV recently on television it brought back memories of that movie.  As you became more involved in what was happening it was much more difficult to let go.  This was not only due to the thought of winning something, but also with how well Peter and Brian worked together bringing the event to life.  Even though they had only met a few hours earlier how they were able to play off of each other made it seem like they were friends for quite a while.  With the two of them providing some entertainment the flow of prize giveaways slowed but the interest peaked even more as the question was what would they do or say next.

As the final giveaway (4 days 3 nights lodging in either Reno, Sparks, North Lake Tahoe or South Lake Tahoe, lift tickets and more) provided by flyrenotahoe approached it was a concern of finding a question which would not bring objections from those playing along since it was a sizeable prize. Which did go off initially with a hitch, but once a new question was asked a winner was determined and everyone walked away happy.

I found the day interesting as Social Media was utilized in a new method during “Twitter Trivia”.  Using his already large base of followers as a result of HARO, Peter was able to build buzz about the event of the day.  As people re-tweeted the details of the event, businesses signed up to offer products as it was only costing them the cost of product but giving them a huge technology savvy audience.  While it is unknown how many people were following and sending in answers, as I look on TwitScoop right now six hours after the event ended I am still seeing trending topics which were answers to trivia questions.  It is not everyday Voltaire is a trending topic on Twitter.  Peter mentioned he would write a blog post about the events of Boxing Day after getting some rest, so it will be good to here his thoughts and how this shows the promise of Social Media to companies who can embrace the technology.

In case you were wondering if I won anything.  I did indeed win an OGIO bag for knowing about the 19 hour AOL outage and quickly getting my answer into Twitter. But even winning the bag, I was hooked and continued to follow as well as learn about new products as well as other interesting people to follow on Twitter, just like the sponsoring companies would like.

This past July I headed out west to a friends wedding in the Sacramento Area, after this event it was off to Lake Tahoe for a few days.  Unfortunately a Telegraph fire near Yosemite started up around this time and when getting to the lake I was welcomed with a wall of smoke due to the winds blowing the smoke north.  On the last day I was at South Shore and woke up early and headed drove over to Emerald Cove where as some light started to show in the morning hour it was obvious the winds had changed direction for a while giving the image below which is the July 2008 in the Twelve Images of 2008.