Not exactly Denver, this is the Evil Knievel pinball machine in Lyons

Airshow in Broomfield, a flyby in the setting sun

I destroyed my second f/2.8 17-50mm lens after working with this capture. I guess I will have to let it go and part ways with the lens series. Despite my absolute and undying devotion to the lens, it has brought me most of my favorite pictures, there is a point where I should probably get the message. Time to head to the camera store and find a new one ... or perhaps ... maybe the same one if I can't let go ;-) Here is union station, another one of the penultimate pictures in Denver proper.

There are so many ways to look at this picture of this church and the building behind it ... but definitely we're talking about modern society overwhelming this more religious view of the world ... remember how spires on churches reach to the heavens, what can you say for our desire to build commercial real estate that dwarfs our religious symbols?

One of my favoritist sculptures in Denver. It's in kind of a bad setting though ... maybe when the Denver Post goes under and I buy the land, crush the building and turn it into "Paul's Vinyl (Record) Mart" the sculpture will finally have a proper setting ....

I increased the cloud intensity on this one: Together We Move Through

Here are the figures again, near the Denver Center Theater complex. This is more of a sense experience as there is music playing, so to render these pictures without a sense of time and change would be a mistake, IMHO.

Looking out of the denver center theater complex. I always wanted to shoot from in here but it is FAR more difficult to find a picture than I thought it would be. This is getting closer.

The alleys of downtown Denver are not quite like other cities, other than the smell of rotting food, this one was pretty much spotless and we didn't even have to worry about random people jumping out at us :) This is right off the 16th St. Mall.

One of these nights

These shots of Denver and the 16th Street Mall are peculiar in many ways. The lighting is tricky and the long exposures can work for you or against you, especially when you are rooted on a parking garage.

Looking West on the 16th St. Mall

City Park

Rain Delay

I call this the "Bird Tree" at City Park. This is an unabashedly HDR photograph with two stops separating the three images. The textures in the sky were fun and the way the open sky haloed the tree was too cool to pass up and fit into HDR so well I couldn't resist.

The New Year's 2010 Fireworks show with a Blue Moon rising over the downtown.

Fireworks and a Blue Moon

Blue Moon over Denver on New Year's Eve 2010.

A slightly different view of the Denver City building as traffic moves down Colfax.

The State Capitol building in Denver during a snow storm :-) Brrr....

The city building lit up for 2010.

A shot of the Wild West Show at the National Stock Show in Denver, Colorado.

Whereas some of the other shots were about energy, I think this one was a bit better at showing the colors of the night...but really sticking to the attempt and seeing how the crowd interacted with the show without doing one of the classic "Here is a picture of a child staring at the fireworks".

I took a LOT of fireworks shots with two different lenses, the close-ups tended to have a lot of smoke ... without much wind it just wasn't clearing. This was with my wide-angle and I think starts to get at what I wanted ... a large crowd full of energy, a beautiful night and plenty of lights.

Mandatory Denver Night Shot for New Years.

Pre-fireworks looking West on the 16th Street Mall ... this was the exact picture I was trying to take! I kid you not!

This is my favorite picture of New Year's Eve. The wide angle compresses the curvature of the building...now...would it be wrong to use photoshop to remove that sign? Should I have pulled it out of the ground and stuck it in the neighbor's yard, then taken the picture?

There are a few of these that are similar but different apertures. This is my wide-angle lens so I'm actually pretty close in for the shot, but still have a lot of green between the building and me. Still, I am constantly surprised by how much a "simple" foreground like grass can become part of the image. A few more seconds with depth of focus could have made this image even better, though I ended up liking it (and the family) more than I expected...the symmetry bugged me last night...today I'm OK with it.

This is a practice shot for Paris. This is one of the memorials at city park (I think that's the park name)...we worked with aperture settings and traffic timings to get this right :-)

10 Points when Lit

A view of Denver, at night. I made big plans to head out on Friday night to get this shot but my day lost momentum when my son headed out to his Mom's for the weekend. I suddenly had the urge to lay around on the couch and watch Fringe with some take-out food. Thankfully, my friend Art dropped me a text telling me he was going to drop into the city from a too-windy lookout mountain photo stakeout so I packed up my gear. I found this location several months ago and didn't really value it at the time because it wasn't the shot I was looking for at the time, despite it turning into a great HDR after the fact. But I knew I wanted to get back here and it turned into exactly what I had hoped. You can see the light from the nearly full moon peaking out from the tallest building, I have some moon shots from the night (when I was a little bit to the right) I thought about photoshopping in but there is something I like about the light from the building ... sort of a hidden feel). Enjoy.

U2 at Invesco Field, May 21, 2011