A Nebraska supercell after dark
(Click to enjoy the storm a little bigger, almost like you were there. Okay, not really) Whew. It’s around 9am right now and I just landed in Phoenix a bit after 7am after flying out from Oklahoma City this morning. A long trip, I added around 2200 miles to the lovely Hyundai Santa Fe I rented and slept in the car two of the three nights for a total of five hours. I did actually rent a hotel on Tuesday night and it was some of the best sleep I’ve had in awhile. The bottom line from the trip was [...]
The big Stormchasing Trip of 2011
It’s Monday morning and if you are reading this, it’s likely I just posted it before boarding a plane for Denver, Colorado as I am off on my 2nd Annual Stormchasing super-duper adventure. This could lead to two things: 1) I am way too busy to post any blogs until maybe Friday and perhaps not even then…or 2) I will see some amazing stuff and will be unable to control myself and HAVE to post something. Last year I did this for basically a single day. Flew into Denver at night, drove to Nebraska, crashed at some hotel and then [...]
Happy Friday!
I can’t wait to hopefully see this face today. I’m flying back from Las Vegas mid-day only to rush off to an event shoot in the afternoon and then the First Friday showing downtown. I’m crossing my fingers that somewhere in all that is a brief moment to give Lyla a hug. Not a lot of time today, busy, busy, busy…so I wish you all a happy Friday and hope you have a great weekend!
Stay off my sh*t
(click to see a larger dumpster with a beautiful black border) I shot this during my HDR Workshop back in February. I just love what the 50mm 1.4 does on a full frame with that wide aperture. No Focal Point or any other Photoshop effect for the depth of field…just good ol’ f/2.0. Graffiti can either be awesome or, most of the time, just plain and basically ugly. It’s rare to find something that is just pure art out here. This is really nothing awesome, but the inspiration for the title of this post made me laugh. Kind of curious [...]
The Town
(A much better view can be had by clicking to see with a black border and slightly larger!) This is probably the first time that a Movie Title Wednesday film has been something so recent. That could mainly be due to the fact I don’t SEE as many movies as I used to what with a kid and all. Before Lyla, my wife and I would tend to see around 1-2 movies a month, always on Saturday mornings with the elderly folks at the earliest possible showing. It’s less crowded, more quiet and then we could always come back home [...]
Eights
(image is bigger and looks better with a dark background if you click on it) Wow, today is starting off weird. Have you ever had an image that you poured over, processed for hours, uploaded to your blog, published it and then actually LOOKED at it and realized it had major flaws? Halos? Dust spots? How did you miss that? How is it possible you looked over that whole image for hours and it took this new eye of viewing it on your blog that made you REALLY see it? Well, I’m honest enough about this stuff…happened to me today. [...]
Screencast: Natural clouds in your HDR images
Natural Clouds in your HDR Landscapes from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo. (Before you start watching the screencast here, you may just want to watch it over on Vimeo because the quality of the embedded version appears to be a lot lower than what you get to see on their website. So I’d suggest going there, choosing Full Screen and then turn Scaling off to get the best experience.) For awhile now I’ve been wanting to put together a screencast of my processing methods when it comes to HDR. The way I use Photomatix, Photoshop and the Perfect Photo Suite [...]
Standing on a corner…
“…in Winslow, Arizona…such a strange sight to see…some photogs, Lord, looking really weird, and I think they’re staring at me…” Yeah yeah…I’m no lyric writer, give me a break If you follow this blog, you’ll remember a few weeks back that a few of us Phoenix photogs woke up butt-early in the morning to meet at 3:45am and drive to Two Guns, AZ for a little sunrise shooting at a ghost town. I can’t even tell you how much fun we had and how great it was to hang with these guys all day. We spent a lot of time [...]
Into the West
(to see the image larger or so it fits into your screen resolution, have a click-see) It’s been awhile since I posted any images from our trip up to the abandoned ghost town of Two Guns, Arizona. First off, you gotta love a name like that. If there was ever a contest to name an old west town in Arizona…that has to be up at the top. I will say, the structures left behind at Two Guns weren’t exactly what you’d picture seeing if you heard “ghost town”. Normally you’d think of old wooden saloons, stables, whatever. At least, that’s [...]
Little Miss Sunshine
(click to see larger, crisper, with a nice dark border) If you were to boil my life down to the basic things that are essential to my existence…the photo above represents all of it. Before I go on about my two girls, today is Movie Title Wednesday so of course I gotta talk about the film for a bit. Little Miss Sunshine is one of my favorite movies from the last decade or so. A fun, hilarious movie with an awesome cast, great story and a VW bus that couldn’t stop honking. If you somehow missed this one, I’d give [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.