The Beeline Curve
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 70-200 2.8 is l, 185mm, f/11, iso 100, 30 sec) One of my favorite roads in Arizona is the Beeline Highway. It takes you through some of the most beautiful areas of Arizona. You can see the Superstition mountains, the Four Peaks, Sycamore Creek and all kinds of other things. It allows you to travel from Phoenix to Payson, where the beauty and cool temps of the Mogollon Rim are only 90 minutes from the hot desert. I’ve always loved this curve in the highway, but never figure out [...]
Terry’s Bug
(image looks a wee bit sexier if you click on it to view in lightbox) This bug was one of the first arrivals at a car show the morning of our February 5th Urban Phoenix Photowalk. The sun wasn’t even up yet when we wandered through here and there were quite a few of us grabbing shots of this sweet ride. I’ve always had a fondness for Beetles even though I never owned one. I was friends with a girl in high school who for some reason had an awesome tripped out blue Bug that I got to ride in [...]
Herbiette
If there ever was a Love Bug, it would be Herbiette, this fuchsia colored Volkswagen Beatle that we saw during our Urban Phoenix Photowalk on Saturday morning. I was worried all week about this photowalk because the weather called for clear skies up until 5am that morning. When I scheduled the thing for that early in the day (6am), part of me is hoping we’ll get some amazing morning colors to shoot in the background of our city shooting. As luck would have it, we were all treated to a beautiful sunrise. At the same time as our walk, there [...]
Warp Speed
A few nights ago I declared I was tired of urbex for awhile and wanted to get out and shoot some desert landscapes against the setting sun. I hadn’t been to South Mountain in awhile and didn’t remember much of it, so I dragged along my wife and daughter and we drove up to the top of Summit Road where you can see the entire city. It’s breathtaking. But for me, I didn’t want to just sit there with the hundreds of other people and take a picture that everyone else was taking. So we didn’t even stop at the [...]
A pair of rails at sunset
(Rebel XSi, Tamron 17-35mm, 17mm, ISO100, F16, six exposures) As I’ve talked about in a few recent posts, I’ve been exploring downtown Phoenix more in the past week. On two separate occasions I’ve been able to drive around just before the sun went down and just see what I see. And you know me…I don’t tend to go out shooting unless there is hope for something good in the sky…cool clouds, a sunset, whatever. Blue skies depress me. This was a fun night with a fairly decent sunset, although it was pretty far off on the horizon. Still, a couple [...]
The birth of a monsoon dust storm
Awhile ago I posted the above photo of an awesome looking monsoon thunderstorm headed towards us. This was shot only a half-mile from my house and once it hit, we had over an inch of rain in less than an hour. One of the big bonuses of observing this particular scene was having a front seat, wide angle view of the birth of a dust storm. Now, this wasn’t going to become one of those massive haboobs you may have heard about that happen in Arizona, but it was fun to watch anyways. What you will see below is likely [...]
The Harley Davidson in Bruges, Belgium
You may find after I eventually post most of my Holland-Belgium photos, that I have a serious love of cool alleyways. Everytime I walked past one on this trip, I was craning my neck and peering down them to see if it was interesting enough to shoot. I loved this one in particular. Cobblestone, brick walls, the blur doors, the archway at the end…plus a Harley Davidson parked in the foreground and a sports car out in the distance. I actually love the balance the car creates, even if it was part of the “Smart Car” family. This is a [...]
A sweet Ford GT
During the maternity photoshoot last week, the father-to-be noticed this sweet Ford GT drive up and we ended up finding it a bit later on our walk-around at Joe’s Farm Grill. I don’t know much about cars at all (that’s probably an understatement too), so I didn’t even realize Ford made a sweet looking ride like this. I tried to explain to Terrence the beauty of HDR photography and what a picture of this car might look like once I was done processing it…and then I realized how trying to explain HDR to a non-photog is almost like explaining what [...]
Stormchasing: Scary clouds over the highway
My intention while I was out stormchasing was to get photographs that weren’t dominated by powerlines and other vehicles like a lot of severe weather photography is like these days. But I couldn’t resist the shot of these insanely crazy clouds over this road and the car of a few other stormchasers I was following along with. These guys were great…they pulled over alongside me earlier and asked if I was chasing, so we chatted and kind of stuck together for awhile. Good guys and it was amazing to find out how friendly people were. I met another stormchaser while [...]
Funny story…
…so this car is stuck in mud in a wash/river bed where I take photos now and then. Awhile ago I was there, walked up the other side and when I looked back, a cop was by my car. He told me when I came back that it was a hot spot for stolen cars to be dumped. Crazy. So today I stop by here and I see this car. Stuck in the mud. Window open. Who would drive a Saturn down into a wash? I figured it was stolen of course, so I snapped this photo of it, looked [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.