Seeping
This is the 7th Avenue bridge over some railroad tracks set just north of Grand Street. One of my recent excursions exploring the south side of downtown Phoenix brought me underneath this gem of a structure, complete with grunge and oldness. I tend to look for symmetry and lines in a lot of my images. It’s a running theme I guess…railroad tracks, roads…the belly of bridges…give me depth and disappearing lines and I am a sucker for it. What struck me about this bridge when standing under it (quickly firing brackets in the utter quiet, trying not to freak at [...]
Shop 525
I may have written about it already, but last week I dragged my wife and kid out to explore downtown Phoenix with me right before the sun went down. As we drove around, we suddenly saw this old brick warehouse with the doors wide open, and there was a restaurant and a vintage clothing store inside with globe lights hanging everywhere. It was amazing because there really was nothing around it that was like it. No stores, no malls…it sits a few blocks south of US Airways and is called The Duce. We checked out the inside, which is a [...]
G. Love and Special Sauce
Until last week, I had never heard of G. Love and Special Sauce. I still couldn’t tell you much about the band except they are a bluesy, hip-hop alternative band and I kind of dug their music a bit when I listened to a few songs this evening. Then I saw some YouTube videos where they sang along with the likes of Tristan Prettyman (here) and Jack Johnson (here)…and, well…they are kind of awesome and I may need to buy a CD. So where did that name even come from? Well, I honestly am not even sure it relates to [...]
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 [...]
Please Kee Door Close
(Rebel XSi, Tamron 17-35mm, 17mm, ISO100, F8, six exposure HDR) No, the title isn’t a typo. I’ve been teetering on the edge of buying the onOne Software Perfect Photo Suite for awhile now. My good buddy Brian Matiash just went to work for that company and I discovered yesterday that he named a couple of the Photo Tools presets after some photographer friends he has, including yours truly. As most good friendships between buddies go, insults are the way we communicate. So of course instead of naming the preset “AZ Bad Ass” he decided to go with the more humiliating, [...]
Sunset over downtown Phoenix
(Rebel XSi, Tamron 17-35mm, 17mm, ISO100, F16, six exposure HDR) Phoenix sucks in the way that the freeway system tries its absolute very best to avoid the downtown area. I love how the bigger cities out there like Boston have freeways and large highway systems that gut the downtown area. In Phoenix, you have to try very, very hard to get any kind of shot with a freeway + tall buildings. I had been eying this parking garage ever since I moved downtown and had been wanting for a nice sunset to go with it. It’s not the best spot [...]
Judgment Night
(Canon Rebel XSi, Tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, ISO100, F8, six exposure HDR) Back in 1993 in the late fall, a little movie called Judgment Night hit theaters and my wife (then new girlfriend, we had graduated that summer from high school) checked it out one Friday evening. We never knew exactly what it was…maybe the theater was cold and it made the atmosphere feel a bit more real…but my wife and I got totally sucked into this film and completely freaked out by it. And we loved it. I mean, it’s a vivid memory for both of us to this [...]
Closed
(Canon XSi, Tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, ISO100, F8, Six Exposures, HDR) Feels like it’s been awhile since I just went out shooting for “me” instead of client photoshoots…and I have to say, Sunday evening was a lot of fun. I had a short, 40 minute shoot at 4pm, so that left me with a bit of daylight to explore the downtown Phoenix area a bit more. I drove down some alleyways, stopped under bridges and saw some things I hadn’t known were there before. There is one real takeaway from my urban exploration trips…I’m a chicken. The sun was down, [...]
Mirror to the Sky
Sometimes you can go light on the processing, sometimes you can go heavy…this photo of the Chase Towers in downtown Phoenix is a bit on the heavy side. There is a plugin called Topaz Adjust and I love the Exposure Color Stretch filter. It can take a good photo and add something unique to it. Most of the time I love the way my images look naturally, but on occasion, I like to shake things up! I shot this over a month ago…just a few weeks after moving downtown. The exploration of the urban Phoenix area has progressed a bit [...]
The Sandlot
The Sandlot…I know the only way you connect that film with this photo is obviously the playground area boxed in by sand, but when I was trying to think of something for Movie Title Wednesday, this one clicked into place. May as well use it now, I think this may be the first time I’ve ever shot anything sunset/landscape related from a children’s playground. There was a reason for that of course, I’ll tell you in a bit. But first…The Sandlot…once of those cult classic movies for me that will never get boring, never get old and never fail to [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.