Rochester Book now available on Amazon.com

I Love Rochester New York is now available on Amazon.com.  The book can also be obtained from local stores where books are sold, museum gift shops, or directly from me by e-mailing rulon.simmons@gmail.com. 

Below is a photo from the book depicting the 1991 ice storm.

USA Trip

A week ago Rebecca and I returned from a 5 ½ week, 10,000-mile tour of the United States.  We traveled through 25 different states, visiting family and of course taking pictures.  I targeted specific locations where I wanted to get photographs for a new book on the United States.  With this trip, I have been to every state in the Union at least twice—most of them many, many times.  I succeeded in getting the desired pictures.  One of our favorites is from the Seed Saver Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, the Golden Polish Chicken (shown below). 

New E-mail Address

My new e-mail address is rulon.simmons@gmail.com. 

Here is another picture from my book I Love Rochester New York.

Book Earns Over $600 for Charity

As an ITT Geospatial Systems’ fundraiser for the company’s ITT Watermark charity, sales of my book, I Love Rochester New York, earned over $600 ($5 for each book sold).  The amount is actually being doubled to $1200+ through a matching gift.  The charity helps provide clean water to poor areas of the world.  Overall sales of the book so far are in the neighborhood of 1000 copies.  The picture above is one from the book.

Book Printed

My book, I Love Rochester, NY, was printed on Tuesday at Mercury Print Productions, Inc. in Rochester, NY.  Two four-color Heidelberg off-set printing presses were used to produce the book.  It will take about another week for binding before the books are delivered.  I was impressed with the quality control process, where color, registration, density, etc. were continually monitored (on about one of every 100 sheets) as the presses were running.   One photo below shows a sheet being pulled for evaluation.  I am evaluating the cover pages in the other photo.   

Air Show

Last Saturday, I photographed a friend’s family reunion.  This person happens to live right at the end of a Rochester International Airport runway.  The reunion was scheduled to overlap with the ESL Air Show.  So I got to photograph the family, participate in a picnic, and enjoy the air show.  One of my favorite pictures shows two of the Navy’s Blue Angel jets, flying in mirror image (one right-side-up and the other up-side-down).  Photographic settings for these pictures were approximately ISO 800, f/8, and 1/4000 sec.

Hill Cumorah Pageant

Since 1998, I have served as the Hill Cumorah Pageant photographer.  I helped as an assistant with the photography for many years before that.  Over the years, the photography has included taking pictures of cast teams, picturing families in costume (discontinued last year), and taking publicity photographs.  It has been wonderful to feel the excitement of pageant each year as a cast of around 800 comes together and in a very short time is ready to present the show.  Lorna Bingham helped me take the cast team photos this year.  Together we photographed 36 cast teams and the work crew last Saturday afternoon.  Afterward, I stayed for the performance and captured some additional pictures during the show.  Below are pictures of Nephi’s boat in a storm, the Destruction Scene, and the work crew.