The Road Ahead (Welcome to the new look)
(click to see the image above in a beautiful lightbox with a nice, dark border) Well, you’ve no doubt noticed things look a lot different here today. Of course, if this is your first visit, that may not mean much, but I welcome you here just the same! To those that follow this blog and my photography on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, this is the first theme change I’ve done to this website in a very long time. I’m never the type of person to stay happy with a theme for very long, but the previous one was [...]
The winding road
(clickity click on the image for a biggity big version) I know, a road shot right? This is yet another shot from my trip to Nelson/El Dorado Canyon southeast of Las Vegas back in mid-March. The clouds, the light, the winding road…were almost too much fro me to handle. I saw too many shots I loved and had to reel myself in thinking “Do you really need 25 more road shots Mike??” My real, unabashed answer to that from deep inside me is YES…but in reality, certain road shots are special, most aren’t and you gotta know when it’s worth [...]
Cold Mountain
(please click on me, I look better a bit bigger with a nice, dark frame around me – sincerely, the image above) Sometimes the movies I pick for Movie Title Wednesdays are ones that I absolutely love and would watch a hundred times over. However, on some occasions, I love them mainly because the title fits perfectly with the photo I want to use. At the same time…you can always be sure I’ve at least SEEN the movie. That is my one rule. So this week we have Cold Mountain, a film starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman (pre-plastic) and Renee [...]
Ripples
(click to see larger and a bit better…Wordpress re-sizing makes this one a tad too dark in places) The image I posted yesterday evoked some awesome comments from you guys about what might be wrong with the composition of the scene. It came down to the foreground element. And over the course of the comments, it became clear that the foreground in a landscape photo can make it or break it. I wanted to thank you all for your input. I honestly wasn’t able to put a finger on it until your thoughts helped me realize I was thinking the [...]
Morning on the Bradshaws
(click to view a little bigger and better in lightbox) Do you ever have an image where you struggle and struggle with liking it, then hating it, then liking it, then hating it…and…well you get the idea. I’m sure you do. For those of us blogging on a daily basis, we can’t necessarily post masterpieces every single day. We sometimes have those borderline photographs that we like, but we may not like it enough to actually hit the “publish” button on the blog. This image is one of those for me. I figured I may as well post it to [...]
Waves in the Desert
(click to view with a dark border and sized to fit your monitor/resolution) I’m pretty tired right now. I get back in town tomorrow afternoon, but will be back here in Vegas all next week. Long days, focused work…draining. I’ll be a happier man once vacation gets here in mid-May. I can’t wait to see some of our family living in Memphis. This is another photograph from last Sunday morning’s trip along the Apache Trail in search of those wonderful morning-after-a-storm pictures that I love. The scene has a lot of crazy elements to it, including a solo Saguaro cactus, [...]
The open door
(click to view image larger in lightbox for a better look) My life has become a lot about where I am currently located these days…either Phoenix or Las Vegas. The project at my day job has gotten really busy up there so my presence has been required more. It’s hard to travel to much, because I hate being away from my girls. But traveling does give me chances to see new places. One of the recent visits I made included a trip to the ghost town of Nelson. I was a bit bummed to find out that the actual “real” [...]
The Man on the Hill
(click to see the man larger in lightbox) It’s April and the high yesterday in Phoenix was around 55 degrees. The snow level dropped to 4500 feet and the mountains east of town had the white stuff on them after the crazy “spring” storm we had over the weekend. It was really a last gasp of winter for us, which was insane considering we’ve already had a 100 degree day in 2011. The storms hit on Saturday, so Sunday morning I met my buddy Ken Peterson out in Apache Junction to shoot the sunrise and see what we could see. [...]
The Gap
(To get more up close and personal, click on the image to view in lightbox) Whatever. I love road shots. I’m sure people know this about me…but I make no apologies. Sometimes I think it’s almost cheating to shoot on the road, because you really don’t put a lot of work into it right? You just pull over, walk to the middle and shoot. It’s not like I hiked four hours to the middle of Yellowstone to capture something never seen before. I just stepped out of my car? It’s almost lame right? Well, I think road shots helps capture [...]
Se7en
(Click to view in lightbox, the choice of a new generation) If you haven’t seen the movie Se7en, then you probably wont get how it connects with the image above. You probably wont get the horrific moment it represents in the film either. And I don’t want to give anything away for people who still want to watch it, so I’ll do my best to just skip those details. Needless to say, when I was processing this photo…it was suddenly obvious that it was going to be used for Movie Title Wednesday. I think I even may have had an [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.