I speak elsewhere on the site of The Phartists, a merry band of painters and photographers I'm privileged to travel with pursuing our varied arts.

There is another group important in my artistic life, and we head off somewhere each year, a group of some of the world's finest photographic minds -- writers, designers and educators and all of them extremely talented photographers. We've worn many names, the dozen or so of us, but finally settled on adopting a classic photographic term as our group's monicker.

We are henceforth: The Circle Of Confusion.

The Circle's 2011 outing was to the national and state parks surrounding the town of Moab, Utah. We called this excursion "The Great J.O." Why? That inside joke I'm not inclined to reveal, but I am more than happy to share here some of the photographs from that trip.