HDR Tennis: Match 7
I participate in a group of awesome photographers that take a set of brackets from one of us and then process it in our own creative way. Then we post the results and get fans on our Facebook page to vote and choose which one they like the best. Fans of the page can also download the brackets and put their spin on it at all. A little friendly competition is good and healthy, and definitely a lot more fun when you WIN! We call it HDR Tennis and the image above was my entry…which turned out to be the [...]
The Shawshank Redemption
I was scouring some of my images last night looking for the right one to post for Movie Title Wednesday. Usually I save my best work for these days (in my eyes of course), but the ones that I really, really loved just couldn’t be connected to a movie for some reason. But then I saw this one, thought “Shawshank” and immediately knew I had today’s photograph. And I actually really like this image. What can I say about The Shawshank Redemption that most of you wouldn’t know already? I mean, it’s in a lot of people’s top 10 favorite [...]
Inside Out
After wandering around the dog track for an hour or so, I ended up coming back to the rows of seats with a new perspective and a new lens on my camera. As I’m prone to do, I started with the 17-35mm because I wanted to capture the vastness and enormity of the place. But later I realized I was missing out on the subtle nuances everywhere you looked. One of them was the weirdness of standing inside a building but still feeling like you were outside. All the giant windows were broken, bushes were growing inside and occasionally a [...]
HDR: A Primer (February 26th, Phoenix Photography Workshop)
I’m so very excited to announce my first ever HDR workshop! I’ve been talking about this for around 4-5 months, I started working on it at the end of last year and finally am ready to go live with an actual date. I know this is going to be a fun experience, educational, hands-on and hopefully will set people down the right path when it comes to learning how to shoot and process high dynamic range images. Before I get into the details of the workshop, you maybe wondering why I even think I’m qualified to teach anyone anything in [...]
Must
There are a lot of “musts” in this photo…all traffic must turn right…you must not park here…you must stop ahead…and of course at the time I thought “I must take this photo.” What is it about me and the weather? I mean, first it was lightning, then it was photographing awesome monsoon clouds across the desert and that was followed closely with wanting to chase storms in the midwest. On this night, it was the thought of rainy, reflective roads that got me out shooting around downtown Phoenix until midnight. If it hadn’t rained, I wouldn’t have been out there, [...]
Outside
My daughter is two and she’s always wanting to explore the world, never satisfied with where she is right now. If we’re inside…of course she wants out. “Daddy….owwwwtside!” Once outside, she wants to do more. If she’s in the backyard sitting on the patio steps with me, she wants to climb the stairs to the guest house. If we’re on the side of the house, she runs up to the gate in the picture above and wants me to open it. If I open it and we go out front, she wants to run down the sidewalk. You get the [...]
Missing
A shot from our downtown Phoenix photowalk back in late December. We’re doing another one on February 5th in case you missed it, you can find out more information right here. Doing a photowalk is such a great way to just observe your surroundings and look for those subtle details that might look good as a picture. I think we oftentimes have huge goals in mind like getting to that crystal clear lake for a sunset shot, or some amazing waterfall, or the Grand Canyon, etc…because we get it stuck in our brain that we need something awesome like that [...]
The Urban Phoenix Photowalk
Towards the end of 2010, a group of us got together and did a downtown Phoenix photowalk early one morning and had a great time. Starbucks coffee, gorgeous sunrise, illegal train track walking, chased away by imaginary cops…it was a ton of fun. I’ve had people express a lot of interest in doing another one, so I’d like to start making a habit out of it. There is a ton to see and shoot in the urban Phoenix area and we could probably do a photowalk every month this year and still not get to everything. So without further ado, [...]
The Birds
Sometimes when you look at a photograph quickly, you may not notice the subtle nuances about it. My buddy Mark Garbowski recently posted a shot called The Bowl on the Cobblestone Street…because the shot was so wide, so expansive, you might have missed a curious little bowl sitting in the middle of the road, which for me, kind of made the image unique. Well, today is Movie Title Wednesday and I dubbed this photo The Birds, just in case you missed them on first glance. I left the image clickable to a larger size so you can see them better. [...]
Tarantula!
What, where is the tarantula?? Okay, nowhere…but sometimes I have a hard time coming up with titles and this one especially. But to show you how my mind works, when I looked at this image…and saw the kind of miniature looking saguaro cactus, it made me first and foremost think of an old movie backdrop or set in the 1950s, which then reminded me of the movie Tarantula that I saw at some point in my childhood. More than likely because of my dad…I mean, when you’re 9-years old, who else but your dad is going to make you watch [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.