Wildlife Photographer

By Brittany Mangus

I love nature. Below are some photos that I've taken over the years. I seem to have a knack for attracting wildlife. This should further the accuracy of my diagnosis of "Snow White" that I received from the online Disney Princess Test.


This is a bull moose we saw near Bear Lake.

This is a coyote we saw near Brighton.

This is my cat (Parley P. Cat), taunting a pair of blue birds. (The blue birds are wildlife!)

Mule Deer, Book Cliffs, UT

Que with a moose near Brighton.

Another shot of that same moose.

This is a (small) fish I caught last month. I probably shouldn't include pictures of wildlife that I've killed, but what the heck. Otherwise I couldn't post this picture:

This is Chuck. Well, this was Chuck. That is, before The Incident. (Don't worry, I don't have any "After" photos.) Anyway, Chuck was the chipmunk that wandered into our house in Ephraim. My roommates and I tried to herd him out of our house and back into the wild, but we lost him. Three days later we found him again; smashed between my box springs and my mattress. There is nothing like realizing you've not only squashed the life out of a rodent, but that you've slept with its rotting corpse in your bed for 2 nights. I love nature.

Picture Perfect

Abel Keogh

As I parent, I know that one day one of my kids will leapfrog me when it comes to technology and understand how to work a computer, video game, or some device that hasn’t been invented yet better than their old man.

However, I never thought that they’d be four years old when they did it.

Our oldest is fascinated by cameras. He loves taking pictures with my digital camera (gulp!) or my cell phone camera. And I like looking at the photographs he takes because it’s interesting to see how he views the world.

(This is what our kitchen sink looks like from his perspective.)

Usually he’ll take pictures with my cell phone camera until the memory is full. Later I’ll go through the pictures, save the one or two I like, and delete the rest.

On Saturday I was going through the latest round of photos and noticed that they some of them had some special effects added to them.

I called our oldest over and asked if he had taken that picture. With quite a bit of pride in his voice, he told me that he had done that.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Push seven,” he said.

I pushed seven. Nothing happened.

“It’s not working,” I said.

“You have to start at the beginning,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Obviously frustrated with his old man’s inability to work a simple cell phone camera, our four year old took the camera from me and in a few moments was pushing the seven button and scrolling through a list of special effects.

“See?” he said.

“Wow. That’s amazing. How did you figure that out?”

“I just learned it,” he said.

He scrolled through the special effects and held the camera up so he could see me.

“Smile, Dad,” he said.

I smiled.

And he took a picture.

Entry cross-posted here.