While working in my archive, I felt like these two images went well together. So, I did a quick diptych in Adobe Lightroom.

The past year my dad, J Parson, pushed his music career ever higher with the release of his fifth CD.

My January saw partiers, beachgoers and teenagers. All in all, it wasn’t a bad start to 2011.

An interesting thing happened after driving back into the United States from Vancouver, British Columbia in July. Something that would have been a nightmare had I been on assignment.

I used the opportunity to familiarize myself with Pittsburg, a town of roughly 20,000 people.

It’s been two months since my last post from my summer travels in the American West. Having finished a separate spat of travels between then and now, and seeing how I left off previously in Montana, I’ll pick back up in Glacier National Park.

My first weekend in Southeast Kansas coincided with the annual festival known as Little Balkans Days, held in Pittsburg to commemorate the region’s history as a melting pot of European immigrants back at the start of coal mining in the 1860s.

Across the road from our house is a fried chicken restaurant and a church. So it’s not so much that I wondered why the city of Pittsburg, Kansas — roughly 25 miles from Joplin, Missouri — has only one mosque.

I’m in the small town of Girard, in the southeast corner of Kansas, not too far from the Missouri border. I’ve been documenting the surrounding areas since driving here from San Diego a week ago, but with a ton of photos in my backlog I thought I’d share a teaser.

It was lucky that we ran into Jan, because otherwise we wouldn’t have backtracked and spent the afternoon crawling through stalagmites hundreds of feet under Montana.