In Colorado, where I live, you can see forever. Drive in from our airport (whose code should be BFE, not DEN), and you can easily see Pikes Peak some 80 miles south, and Longs Peak, some 55 miles to the north. Compass points of comfort — I grew up always knowing my place in this big, wide landscape.

I bring this up because the Dominican Republic couldn’t be any more different in this regard. Driving along the North Coast Highway, from Puerto Plata to Playa Grande, you hardly ever see the ocean even though its within spitting distance to the left. Trees and development obscure the view most of the way, with only a few tantalizing glimpses of cerulean blue here and there.

What this does for a traveler, in effect, is increase the potential for massive surprises. I wouldn’t have thought much of Sosua based on my first impression. Another town, crowded sidewalks, wires crossing the airspace over the road, motorcyclists dodging in and out of traffic, and then poof — you’re back in the countryside. Why would we go back?

Well, as it turns out, Sosua has an amazing beach nestled on a big bay, and its from here that many of the area’s scuba trips and booze cruises launch from. On our second day at the Ocean Manor Resort in Cabarete, we were alerted to a snorkeling trip done out of Sosua, and so we decided to check the town out. Unfortunately, the first time, the waves were up and the weather was awful for snorkeling, but as serendipity goes sometimes, we found ourselves strolling the sandy-bottomed commercial strip adjacent to Sosua’s beach.

When you travel with a toddler, you can’t help but see through their eyes. Varenna’s curiosity made Sosua an even richer experience. “C’mon, Daddy…” she kept saying, beckoning me onto the beach, under a tree, to a storefront, to a comfy looking chair.

And the hawkers did their best to woe her as a means to melt our hearts—I mean open our wallets. “You want a toy?” they’d ask her. “Look, she loves this inflatable alligator. I sell it to you as a good deal.” Not knowing any better, Varenna would wrap her hands on the toy, and Hailey and I would have to unravel the sale. It was harmless, and all part of the scene, but it made for some entertaining moments.

One purchase we couldn’t deny her was when she plopped herself at a cafe table and exclaimed “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

We ordered a hot dog for her and a beer for daddy, and then she charmed the guys who were hanging out nearby with her elementary Spanish: “HOLA! HOLA? HolacomoSTASS!”

She left with a seashell, and we returned a couple of days later to try the snorkeling. It was an experience not worth repeating. The promise of a trip to explore a protected cove where we could snorkel from the boat or from the beach (where I planned to hang out with Varenna while Hailey and her mom dove in) proved to be a bumpy boat ride to a random reef with little variety of fish and no way to be placed on the beach. So I clutched Varenna in my lap for an hour while we bobbed at sea. Big let down.

But in the end, Sosua was a delightful little spot. Don’t let the main strip fool you.

Playa Grande. Big Beach. Not the most imaginative name, but its a name I won’t forget. That’s because this is the beach you dream about on a winter’s day as you are stowed away in a cubicle in some northern city. Sugary golden sand, ever-changing surf and palm trees that burst open like fireworks. It’s as though it were designed for a Corona commercial.

Problem is, we visited Playa Grande on probably the wettest day of our six-day trip to the Dominican Republic. We drove along the coastal highway for an hour in bright sun, only to pass through the town of Rio San Juan and encounter building cloud cover. We guessed right on the beach’s turn-off, and found ourselves driving over tree-root speed bumps to reach the parking lot. We slathered on sunscreen, bought a cheap turtle sculpture from a nice Dominican man who seemed more concerned about alerting us to the dangerous undertow than selling us stuff, and — that’s when the sky opened up. We had 15 minutes of spotty sun, and then an epic deluge which we waited out in the car.

After the rain, we couldn’t resist a nice walk along Playa Grande’s eastern end, where a wild stand of palm trees swayed over the pounding surf. The light was flat, and had the beach been minutes away from us, rather than a guaranteed 2 hours in the car, we would have returned for sunrise or sunset light photos. It’s a jewel of a beach.

Instead, Hailey and I planned to return on our last day of the trip, but not to the beach. To the golf course that hugs the cliffs above the beach’s western edge. After a few family portraits before the next band of showers, we stuffed ourselves back into our tiny rental car and headed back to Cabarete. We were hungry.

Hailey, Varenna and I just returned last weekend from a six-day vacation in Cabarete, a beach town on the north shore of the Dominican Republic. We traveled with Hailey’s mom, Diana, who instigated the trip last April. The logic was like many vacations hatched for this time of the year: some place warm, with sand and surf. No other requirements.

Why Cabarete? Well, we had access to a timeshare there, and it afforded all the things we needed: a two-room suite with views of the Caribbean Sea. Food? Included. Drink? Yep, that too. We were determined to rediscover loafing.

And it was because of this that I had low expectations for photography. It seemed that we wouldn’t stray too far from the resort, and while we had a rental car, we didn’t plan to use it much (on account we had read in Lonely Planet that the roads were treacherous and that the rules of the road were non-existent).

While I had recently bought a new lens — and I was eager to try out (a Canon 24mm-105mm f4) — I was remarkably less-than-obsessed with my usual vacation routine: waking at dawn, shoulder-slung lens bag for quick access, “can I take a photo of you?” memorized in the local language…

We were going for the main purpose of relaxing on a beach. We had few ambitions. Sigh.

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What we did discover was that driving in the D.R. really isn’t that bad. It’s just different.

After the 30-minute drive from Puerto Plata Airport to the Ocean Manor in Cabarete, I was brimming with confidence. String of mopeds going 15mph? Just skirt right by them. Massive dump truck riding your bumper? Just ease to the side and wave him around on the next straightaway. Donkey on the road? Keep an eye on him but keep going. Cattle drive covering the highway? Yield to the ones with horns (if you want your damage deposit back from Avis, that is).

We arrived on Sunday, and by Tuesday we had abandoned the loafing game plan and hit the road — our curiosity piqued by the drive in, the desire to see Playa Grande, and a renewed sense of road-worthiness. It was a sign of things to come, for throughout our six-night stay, we drove to Rio San Juan and Playa Grande (twice), hung out in Sosua (twice) and checked out the beach scene in downtown Cabarete. Without a rental car, we probably would have loafed a lot more, and — I believe — we would have had a lot less fun.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that driving the highway along the Dominican Republic’s North Shore was my favorite part of the trip. The only tough part of driving was staying alert in the urban areas. The roads are maybe a lane and a half wide, so we encountered plenty of tight squeezes paired with sudden motorbike merges.

But without a rental car, I don’t think I would have had any assessment of the country — its rugged landscape, it’s people, everyday life. All of that would have been based on what I’d read while loafing. That just doesn’t feel right to me.

And so, it turns out we’re not very good at loafing.

This was the fourth vacation we’ve gone on with our daughter, Varenna. I guess its not surprising, but I have to make note of the fact that each time we go somewhere with her it just gets better. She is an incredible observer, picking up on the smallest details, the distant sounds, and even nuances you’d expect a 2-year-old to miss, such as the fact that locals use a different language than us. She quickly learned to say “¿Hola, como estas?” as a form of greeting. This delighted every Dominican she came across.

And she learned to overcome some anxieties around water, especially the ocean. Its very rewarding as a father to watch your daughter evolve in a matter of days, from timidity to just-the-right-amount-of-confidence. Of course, this conquering of Wave Terror also happened the day we were leaving, which meant a lot of her clothes were wetter than we wanted in the suitcase — and let me tell you, nothing’s smellier than a toddler’s seawater-addler clothes after 16 hours in a suitcase.

But so what? That’s what a true vacation is about, right?

Roxborough State Park — located about 45 minutes southwest of Denver — has long been a favorite stomping ground for me, especially in the last 11 years, since my parents moved out that way. It’s quiet, filled with wildlife, and defined by a series of sandstone fins rising upwards of 175 feet over the valley. This is the same geological formation as Red Rocks Amphitheater and Colorado Springs’ Garden of the Gods, only it rises up from the hogbacks in a more hidden, lesser traveled part of the Front Range, making it more intimate and — in my mind — more spectacular.

I had very close friends from Tennessee visiting for New Years, and since we didn’t have time for a run up to Steamboat Springs — or any of the mountains for that matter — I opted to take them out to my parent’s house and walk into the park. As soon as we set off from the house, we were greeted by this scene, of the half moon positioned right in the midst of a formation we’ve always called The Molar. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the Matterhorn eclipsing the moon, but it was cool nonetheless.

Here is a sneak peak of my latest project — Italy, Remasted. In 2005 and 2008, my wife and I traveled The Sexy Boot of Europe and discovered that Italy is indeed better than the hype.

For a combined five weeks we toured Northern, Central and Southern Italy, shooting and eating our way through such magnificent icons as Rome, Florence, Siena and Venice, and such lesser-known gems as Bolzano, Varenna, Val d’Itrea, Matera and Sestri Levante. Italy has a firm hold on our heart, and the images I have from there are some of my most cherished possessions.

Italy Remastered (working title) will be a self-published book via Blurb.com. Whether I sell it or not, we’ll see, but Blurb does such an amazing job of providing photographers innovative, clean layouts and quality printing, I can’t pass it up. So, for the last four weeks I’ve been chipping away at the images I have from Italy. It’s like a rock band going back into their catalogue and remastering a great album to enhance each song’s various elements. Since I’ve improved so much at post-production in Lightroom over the last two years, I’ve been pleased to see my images — both old favorites and rediscovered shots — come alive in a new way.

More to come soon.

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It has been a good two years since I did a family portrait shoot, so when I was asked to photograph the Wagner, Lineberry and Lamberton families out at the Wagner family farm near Hudson, Colorado, I was a bit nervous. “How do I do this again?”

Fortunately, the Lambertons are dear friends, and that quickly vanquished any trepidations I had about venturing back into the family portrait fold.

Furthermore, I was kind of excited about the prospect of shooting out on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. Most everybody forgets that half of this state is flat and covered in brittle grass and farmland. Much of it is private, and none of it is on the way to anywhere for me. It’s not like I just stop on by the Pawnee National Grasslands here and there on my way back from Lincoln, Nebraska. I just don’t head out that way … literally ever.

The Wagner farm is snug against an enormous grass field that faces to the West. My friend Tim (you may remember him from such asinine stunts as Hay Bale Handstand and Great Balls of Fire) was kind enough to get me on the farm for a good 30 minutes before everyone showed up … always good to scout a place and form a loose shot agenda.

The field had an amazing quality to it. It was late September, and the grass still had a little life left in it. None of the winter gray, but none of the springtime green. Just pure golden straw layered for miles. From a low angle shooting into the sun with my 200mm prime lens, it created an incredibly textured effect.

The Lamberton’s took the stage first: Tim and daughter Cora (pictured above), and Lexi and their son Quinn (three photos above).

Next up, I photographed the Lineberry family (above), Jay, Nikki, Turner and their 3-month-old daughter Peyton.

Next, we moved closer in to the residence. The home belongs to Marge Wagner, the matriarch of the family, and her sons Leon and John brought out the tractor for a photo of the whole gang. That’s Grandma Marge above, who was celebrating her 80th birthday.

By now it was around 4pm and the autumn light was getting very rich. The kiddos lasted just long enough to get a handful of everyone-is-smiling-and-no-one-is-blinking shots before the natural meltdowns happened. It was a fun shoot.

Who cares about Capri? That’s what I was thinking when we were planning our 3-week trip to Italy back in 2008. What I knew of it was that it was a Mediterranean hoity-toity haunt for the rich. Maseratis, casinos and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, right?

“Mariah Carey has a house there,” my wife added. Thanks … all the more reason to keep my distance. We had other priorities: Positano, Sorrento, Matera, Puglia, Rome, Umbria, Tuscany…it was already a long list.

So when we rolled into Sorrento at the start of the trip — at the end of what my wife and I will forever refer to as The Longest Day in Human History: an 8am departure from Denver, an overnight flight from Philly, a rental car debacle in Rome, a two-hour train ride to Naples, a transfer to Sorrento on the stop-every-50-feet Circumvesuviana, a two-mile hike uphill to the hotel — Capri was not on the agenda. It wasn’t even close to creeping onto the agenda.

And yet within an hour at the Hotel Minervetta in Sorrento, we were decompressed. The boats in the Bay of Naples bobbed like sleeping ducks. Mt. Vesuvius crowned the horizon, looking like it had been in a good mood for a few decades. Authentic Campagna-style pizza and red wine filled our bellies. This corner of Italy was pretty damn special. Maybe we should see as much of it as we could.

A few days later, we left Positano and the Amalfi Coast so that we could take the afternoon ferry ride to the mystical island that gave us caprese salad and short pants. We had three hours — not much time — but upon pulling into the harbor, we knew this excursion would be worth it. Chalky cliffs rose in all directions, and a pastel village with a humble expression on its face hugged a low, green saddle that separated the island’s two peaks.

We beat feet to the depot and took the second hair-raising bus ride of the day: the precipitous journey from Capri to Anacapri, a landlocked town located high on the island’s rocky shoulder. The bus was standing room only, filled with — surprisingly — a lot of locals. Below us lay a sea whose color can only be described as cerulean. Between us? Air and vertical rock. Not much else.

Anacapri was pleasantly sleepy and clearly removed from the outside world. It’s town alleys ensconced us in white wash, and our feet tripped here and there on uneven pavers. With the exception of the school kids who skipped and sprinted around the piazza, the town was largely silent. We giggled at yet another Amalfi Coast restaurant named “Il Saraceno,” had ourselves some gelato, took fashionable pics of each other leaning stylistically against white walls (ahh, the days before kids), and then boarded the Dare Devil Bus to catch our ferry.

We missed a lot on Capri: the Blue Grotto, the Faraglioni sea stacks, P. Diddy and his yacht… But that was perfectly fine with me. For an island that has such a larger-than-life reputation, it’s quite small, and yet we still found a corner where local life felt like … well, local life as you see it elsewhere around Italy. For a blitzkrieg three-hours of observation, we got a pretty good sense for the place.

What prompted this post? Steve Jobs.

“Oh c’mon!” you must be saying. “If I read another tribute to that guy, I’m gonna——”

I should say that one of Jobs’ most unsuccessful products, one of his “biggest failures” — Apple TV — is prompting this post. We bought one of these devices back in July so that we could run slideshows of our travel photography on our TV. For under $100, its been worth it, and so I’m going back through the archives, and retouching photo sets for the upstairs boob tube.

Is this blog timely? No, not always. So what. The whole reason to take pictures is to capture a story so that you can retell it forever.

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OK. So it’s been three months since we went to Switzerland, but I’m not done posting images. I’m just catastrophically slow at updating my blog now that I have my own business (by the way, check out our killer website, designed by HeyDay Creative).

On top of that, our little family has decided to move to a bigger house. Where this house will be, we don’t know yet, but getting our current place ready has been pretty consuming. The plus? Eventually, there will be new wall space in a new home to decorate with enlargements of Switzerland.

Switzerland still sneaks up on me and blows me away with what we saw. Will I ever see a landscape more beautiful than the Berner Oberland? Will I ever experience a better network of trains? Will I ever attempt to eat a three-foot-long coiled sausage bathed in brown onion sauce?

The answers are: No. No. And hell no.

For the last three major trips we’ve gone on — Mexico, Kauai and Switzerland — we’ve rented a couple of lenses from BorrowedLenses.com. Each time, we’ve made sure to rent a tilt-shift lens.

Now I have never pretended to be the most technically aware photographer. I couldn’t begin to accurately tell you how the optics inside these lenses work. All I know is that a tilt-shift warps the field of focus so that you can manipulate the scene in all sorts of wacky ways. With a normal lens, the field of focus is always parallel to the front of the lens. With a tilt-shift, you pivot that plane in all sorts of weird angles.

There, that’s the best I can do to explain it. Wikipedia is more eloquent.

On Lake Lucerne, we took a day-long boat tour, and that’s where the Canon 45mm TS-E really came most in handy. As paddle-wheelers and charming villages passed by, I set the aperture to a narrower depth, pivoted the lens down (or sometimes on a diagonal) and fired away.

While tilt-shifts can often miniaturize a scene, I find that they can actually show a place in a way that is more true to how the eye sees it and how memory imprints it. Take for instance, the image above. In my memory, the hills, the water, the trees — they are all splashes of color, nothing more. But the structures, the boats and mostly, the feeling — that’s what resonated and stuck with me most. A tilt-shift can capture just those memory burners. They’re fun images to share: “this is how it looked, but this is how I remember it.”

The same goes for this image of Wengen. No other shot I took of this town showed just how nestled in the valley it really was. A standard 45mm wouldn’t have done it as well.

To that, I say “yay, tilt-shifts.”

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The highlight of my trip to the Trappers Lake and the Flat Tops area was hanging out with my dad in a rustic, 400-square-foot cabin in the woods. I cooked up spaghetti with red wine sauce one night, and we polished off a bottle of Plungerhead — which plunged my head pretty badly the next morning, but man, it is such a good wine.

Sure, the lake was beautiful. Sure, the respite from the city was needed. But there’s nothing that compares to good conversation with a good friend over good food and good wine. It made the trip.

While we chatted, I set up my Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod outside the cabin and captured two 20-minute exposures of the night sky with a Canon 24mm f/1.4. This is a situation where the quality of this gear really comes through. Both the camera and the lens are remarkably clear when it comes to shooting the night sky.

There were other guests at the Ute Lodge cabin resort, and since it was so dark out there, I set up a bright white plastic chair next to the tripod so no one would run into my rig. The end result, was pretty cool.

I love star-trail shots. Photography is 99.5% about capturing a moment. This 0.5% of my repertoire is about capturing our place in the spinning heavens. If you look closely in the above image, you might be able to see a straight dotted line, the product of a satellite passing overhead. I had not had this much fun shooting the night sky since Puglia, Italy in 2008. Maybe when I return to the mountains in early October for fall color, I’ll give it another shot.

Summer’s end is fast approaching, which usually means two things in Colorado: luscious Palisade peaches are in season, and most of us are wondering whether we got into the mountains enough.

I started this summer with plenty in the way of mountain time, but they weren’t my mountains. They belonged to the Swiss, and they were ridiculously beautiful. But just recovering from the stresses of that trip meant a good three weekends in a row at home with our little family. By the time we unburied ourselves from the laundry, recharged our businesses, and spent adequate time with extended family, it was late July and I hadn’t seen the Rockies up close in months.

Fortunately, I had a father-son fishing trip on the books, and so on the second weekend of August, my Dad and I strapped a pair of lake kayaks to his pickup truck and set forth to Trappers Lake — one of Colorado’s rare gems, and the birthplace of the American wilderness movement. It was here in the early 1900s that a surveyor named Arthur Carhart told his boss that Trappers Lake needed to be preserved in its wild state for the good of mankind. His boss was a resort developer. Mr. Carhart had some cojones, and thank God he did. The concept of preserved, roadless wilderness is one of the best things about America.

A full 11 years ago, I circumnavigated Trappers Lake with my backpacking buddies. To this day, it was the most ambitious backcountry adventure I’ve done — and its a sweet nostalgic memory, too. Three nights, three lakeside campsites, and more than 30 miles of schlepping. We started at Trappers Lake, ended up clear across the 200,000-acre Flat Tops Wilderness Area, and came back. Two years later, almost the entire area would burn to the ground in one of the many massive wildfires that consumed Colorado in the summer of 2002. I had yet to go back.

It took much of Saturday to get to the White River Valley east of Meeker. Dad and I checked in to the Ute Lodge, a small rustic cabin resort tucked in the woods, whipped together some dinner, and then set off for the lake at sundown. The devastation of the fire was shocking, even nine years later. Empty pine trees covered the hillside like 500,000 upright matchsticks. The ground cover had returned, and returned with a vengeance. Thick green stands of grass covered the adjacent hillside, and along the road in the burn area, fireweed lived up to its name. Both of us found the scenery to be haunting yet beautiful.

At the lake, a profusion of wildflowers greeted us. Columbine, rosy paintbrush, dusky beardtongue, and goldeneye surrounded the trail and wrapped around the lake’s shore. We had come to kayak and fish the lake, which was turning out to be a lot more technically difficult than we imagined. The lake sits a quarter mile from the nearest parking lot, and the two access points were far from boat ramps. One was a wilderness portal trail that banked steeply up loose rocks and curved by the willow-covered outlet and shore. The other dropped from a parking lot down through meadows, but required a long uphill haul at day’s end. With two 12-foot kayaks and fishing gear, this wasn’t shaping up to be an easy launch.

We returned the next morning, and while I seized on the morning light and photographed the fields of wildflowers, Dad assembled the fishing gear and tried to figure out the day. We shore-fished for an hour, which was completely unproductive, and upon returning to the car, we came across an older gentleman who had collapsed on the trail. He was in a cold sweat, and his legs were rubber. I thought we were witnessing a heart attack. Fortunately, he was coherent, and with a little help, we coaxed him 100 yards down the slope to the parking lot where his sons met us. The altitude had completely nailed him, and we were hopeful his kids would do the right thing and drive him to lower altitude. While Dad and I are both fit and can handle the altitude, we’d seen enough. We opted for the other access point for the kayaks.

By noon we were in the water — the hike down from the lot wasn’t nearly as bad as we had imagined. Dad hooked into a cutthroat, but that would be the extent of our fishing success for the day. Trappers Lake has some of the state’s biggest native cutthroat trout, but everyone on the lake was noting that the fish were taking the day off. ”It is too hot and sunny.” “The hatch isn’t on.” “They aren’t hungry.” “It’s too windy.” Whatever. It was still lovely being out on the water.

By day’s end, however, it was beginning to get buggy. Not only are the dead, burned-up trees hard to look at after a day or so, but they’re clearly a breeding ground for mosquitos. Or maybe it was the tall grass and willows. Or maybe it was both. Either way, we lugged the kayaks back up the hill, both arms too occupied to swap at the little suckers. We strapped the boats to the pickup roof, and set off back down the winding dirt road to the Ute Lodge. We had one Samuel Adams in the cooler, and at a beautiful spot where the White River passes through beaver dams, we pulled over, threw down the tailgate, and split the beer with sunset.

After all, that’s what the trip was about: Dad, me, the two of us catching up, seizing the summer and a rare chance to get out of town together. It was the best beer of the year.