More from the Flatiron Cliffs
Hopefully no one is getting bored with photos from the Flatiron Cliffs in the Lost Dutchman State Park. I for one can’t get enough of looking at the mountains and the color of the flowers flooding the desert floor. It’s up there with some of the most favorite things I’ve photographed in my young little career. Yesterday I posted a shot that was sort of a square, which made up the shot above and a pan to the left. But from the start I’ve always loved this single shot, with the stairs on the right, the little valley leading up [...]
More wildflowers from Flatiron at Lost Dutchman
On Friday I posted an HDR version of what I saw out at Flatiron on Thursday late afternoon. The HDR is cool, brings out a lot of textures and gives it a really deep feel, but I also love standard photography as well. The colors were so amazing, you really didn’t need to try hard to get a good shot. If you live in the Phoenix area or close to the Lost Dutchman State Park, I highly suggest you head out there sometime soon before the flowers are gone. They are stunning…simply stunning. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve [...]
The Flatiron cliffs of Lost Dutchman
I almost wanted to title this, “Hey Dutchman, I found the gold!” A somewhat stormy day here in Arizona, awesome clouds everywhere, so I grabbed up my daughter from the babysitter and headed out to the Superstition Mountains and Lost Dutchman state park to take some photos. I’ve been around there a few times, but never have gotten a shot that I really liked. And then I saw Flatiron and the fields of gold wildflowers surrounding the base of the cliffs. They were everywhere. It was amazing to see. Contrast it with sunlight breaking through stormy cumulus clouds and it [...]
The Spring Wildflowers of the Arizona Desert
A good friend of ours named Ryann had been traveling along the US 60 through Superior in the last week and made sure to point out to me all the wildflowers blooming along the highways and mountains. Plus I’d been keeping up with DesertUSA.com and all their reader wildflower reports. They mentioned how the flowers had been going nuts on Silver King Mine road just west of Superior, so I packed the wife and kid in the car Sunday afternoon and we took off. The first thing we noticed was the highway. From when you leave the Apache Junction area [...]
Saguaro Sunset in the San Tan Mountains
A shot of a tall Saguaro cactus with the sun setting behind it. I drove out to the southeast side of the San Tan Mountains on Friday afternoon, hoping to find some flowers to photography at sunset. I didn’t find much, but I did like this shot. Beautiful, stunning mountains on that side of those mountains.
The Green Arizona Desert
My buddy Jon who was in town with his family this past weekend joined me for a hike of the San Tan Mountains just southeast of the Chandler-Gilbert area. It’s a neat little regional park that I never really paid much attention to until I started getting into photography. The views were great, but one of the main reason I went out there was to capture the greenery that is now covering much of the desert floor here in Arizona. The incredible amount of rainfall has created greenish tints to all the mountains around town and when you examine them [...]
Trip up the Beeline
Last week I posted a photo of the Four Peaks sunset, one of my most favorite photos ever. However, that day was not just about the Four Peaks, but also of a little drive I took up the Beeline Highway whilst waiting for the clouds to clear the Four Peaks and the sun to set. Here are a few of those shots! This is a mountain just northeast of where the Beeline crosses the Sycamore Creek. Another shot of that peak…the Beeline runs off in the distance. A shot that I took while dodging traffic on the Beeline. I just [...]
Tuesday's Storms
This week is going to be wild and wacky in terms of weather. I’m hoping that we get enough rain so the Salt River is flowing and maybe some outlying washes become rivers because it sure would be fun to shoot a few photos of those thing! Tuesday night was the second wave of storms, Monday having been fairly week. Tonight though, tons and tons of rain…at last look we had almost an inch of rain at our house! (see my weather station). Before the storms came in though, there were some great clouds and falling rain that just HAD [...]
Some desert photography
Over the Christmas break, we drove around a bit, to Anthem for a little shopping and then just some other random places. A few times we ventured further out to the edge of whatever little area we were in and looked for some desert landscaped to photograph. Here are a few. This was shot up by Anthem. It’s combined with a texture I shot at a desert park on Lindsey and Chandler Heights. This is the same shot in black and white. A waterfall at the park here in Chandler. Hard to believe a sight like this is just around [...]
Some photos with the new lens
Thanks to some wonderful graduation gift cards and money, I was able to purchase a new lens for my camera. It was a 50mm 1.4f (I know, what???) and is a great lens for portraits, low-light situations and many other types of pictures. It’s super-clear and has an amazing bokeh or “blurry” factor with objects behind your main area of focus. Anyways, here are a few shots with this lens…nothing spectacular, although I do love the broken green bottle shot.
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.