Forest Canyon Overlook is one of my favorite places to photograph at Rocky Mountain National Park because there are amazing views in nearly every direction. Depending on the weather, color, and light – you can find a new photo almost every time you visit. On this particular trip I was taking photos of the wildflowers and the sunset, when I saw a group of people hanging out on the rocks at the end of the overlook.

This is one of the older unpublished photos in my archives, taken all the way back in October, 2014 on a trip to Aspen and Snowmass. The weather was intermittently gray and sunny, and this was one of those photographic moments where the two came together into something sort of spectacular. The problem was, the scenery never quite gelled in a coherent way, and I was left with a potentially good photo that never really worked. Thankfully, all I had to do was wait, and technology came to the rescue.

After a lot of work, I am pleased to reveal the new stantonchampion.com. The last version of this site (hosted on Tumblr) had been around since April, 2011 – which was an eternity ago. Since that time:

• Mobile has gone from an afterthought to something central in web design. Responsive tools have emerged to enable this, like Bootstrap.
• HiDPI displays (like Apple’s Retina Display) have become the standard for nearly everyone. Low resolution images are no longer good enough.
• SSL is no longer an option. Encryption everywhere is now the standard.

I wanted to bring my website up to the standards of the modern web, but more importantly I wanted to build myself a nice place to showcase my photos and writing.

When traveling with your camera, it often helps to know the phase of the moon. That said, if you’re not a walking moon phase calendar, simply paying attention to your surroundings can be a good fallback. Such was the case for me one night before I took this photo when I happened to look out the windows of the Google office and see an almost full moon rising over downtown. I immediately opened PhotoPills, saw that the full moon was the next night, and began formulating a plan.

Waking up early can be a great way to find photos, and on this trip to Zürich I was lucky to find this early morning scene of boats in the fog. I was moving quickly looking for subjects, and I ended up shooting this entirely handheld without setting a tripod. The resulting photo worked well, although at ISO 6400 it is a bit noisy.