”Name That Contact” is a little FLICKR game where you are presented with a photo drawn randomly from your FLICKR social network and are challenged to guess the photographer’s name from a list of three. In playing this game, I have always, and likely will always, correctly identify the photos of Charles Uibel, known on FLICKR as ”cuibel." It helps that Charles has had one great photographic obsession these past two years—the Great Salt Lake of Utah. And it helps that Charles is often taking pictures during the “golden hour” before sunset, when the day’s last light sails almost wholly unimpeded across the Great Basin desert of Nevada and skips lightly off that massive, shallow sea. But it’s not merely subject matter that makes the photos so easily identifiable. Charles, in just two years of serious photographic practice, has developed a very distinctive style that combines a feel for the surreal, silence before the sublime, and, often, a sense of humor.

Charles is a life-long resident of SLC who, when not prowling around the Lake, helps build Snowlist.com: The Mountain Marketplace. Charles has been a very active member of FLICKR, known for stirring the conversational pot with smart-ass humor and genuine encouragement of other’s good work, and is the founder of the group ”Anything But Monkeys!” which is dedicated to the art of making absurd comments on people’s photos.

I hope you enjoy the slideshow we’ve assembled of Charles’ work. These 14 images are just a small sampling, and many more can be seen on his FLICKR site. Prints of these images are for sale and can be purchased from GreatSaltLakePhotos.com.

Click here or the image above to view the slideshow.