The cotton fields
(please click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, iso 100, f/16, 1/125 // buy print) If you ordered a copy of my Stormchasing Arizona book, or happened to see my Best of 2011, you may have seen this image already. But it was one of my top five probably from last year’s monsoon season, so I felt like it was owed it’s own blog post. Right? Am I the only one that believes his images have feelings and would feel shunned if they didn’t get their own blog time? I mean, yes, this [...]
The Three Watchmen
(please click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 35mm 1.4 l, f/22, iso 200, 1/4 sec // buy print) There is something majestic about the Saguaro cactus. When they stand by themselves, or even in a group of three…they make me think of something ancient…guardians of the world. Almost like Ents from Lord of the Rings. Ooops, there’s my nerdy side. I was driving down this road chasing a gorgeous storm coming in over the Bradshaw Mountains when I spotted these guys. I just loved, loved, loved the composition with the storm in the background, so [...]
Equilibrium
(canon 5d mark ii, canon 50mm 1.4, iso 125, f/5.6, 30 sec // buy print) Please click to view on black! One thing I try very, very hard to avoid is posting an image and then saying something like “OMG, this is my bestest, most favoritest photo I’ve ever taken in all the land!” I have many reasons for that, and if you want to know them, you can ask, but it’s just my general rule. Yeah, gonna break that one today. Before that though, it’s Wednesday and I haven’t done a Movie Title image in awhile, so here you [...]
Stormchasing Arizona 2011 is ready for Pre-Order!
I’ve been a writer of sorts for a long time now. Started with a three-year or so stint doing sports writing, then some entertainment jabbering, a lot of personal bits and of course, stories to go along with the work I’m doing in photography. But during all that time, if I ever thought about publishing a book, it was always with the idea of writing some kind of science fiction novel or something like that. In fact, I actually wrote a few chapters. Yet here I am on volume two of Stormchasing Arizona and that sci-fi story sits waiting for [...]
Pillar in the Rain
(please click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 85mm 1.8, f/16, iso 100, 1/13th // buy print) My wife was proofreading my upcoming Stormchasing Arizona photojournal (should be ready for preorder next week!) and she commented on how much she loved this particular photo. So to thank her for the 4-5 hours she sat in front of my book, editing and ensuring it was better than I could do myself, I thought I’d post this guy today. These are the Bradshaw Mountains north of Phoenix. I had never really been to this area before, nor down [...]
A sliver of color
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35 f/2.8, 17mm, f/16, iso 100, 0.6 sec // buy print) This was one of the last shots I took during the 2011 summer monsoons. I was about as far away from Phoenix as I’d been all year…near a town called Joseph City that I don’t recall having known existed before. The sky at sunset was pretty epic, but I found myself in somewhat of a bad spot…houses, industrial stuff around, so I kind of missed out on some clouds to my south. But I drove north along a [...]
Cloud to ground
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 24mm, iso 125, f/7.1, 30 sec // buy print) I recommend clicking on the image…it will put a black box around it and fit it to your screen size…just in case your monitor isn’t giant like mine isn’t. Haven’t posted a lightning strike in what feels like AGES, which is probably far from the truth. Anyways, this was a towering strike that I cropped to fill the entire frame. The original capture had it a bit more to the left than I liked. When shooting lightning, sometimes [...]
A road less traveled
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, f/16, iso 100, 1/60 // buy print) A random dirt road off I-17 between Phoenix and Flagstaff. The day was supposed to be epic up north, but it turned out to be mostly a bust. Still, my daughter and I drove down this road looking for something interesting to shoot against the puffy clouds and desert-y terrain. I climbed a low hill to shoot the giant rocks up there, but ended up seeing this instead and liked it a whole lot better. Love me some roads [...]
Leaning
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, f/22, iso 400, 5 sec // buy print) The thing about wide angle lenses is that they give you the perception that things are far away. Like these lightning strikes. They probably were a decent distance aways, but I was hanging in there and hanging in there hoping to get a photo with strikes as big as possible. I was ducking down, hunched over as the storm crawled towards me and the lightning going nuts all over. This was not just a normal thunderstorm…this was a [...]
Weather on the Bradshaws
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, f/22, iso 100, 1/5 sec // buy print) So all spring long (and all year long really), I like to keep up with the stormchasers from the midwest. They post photos from chases and usually you see some wicked storms that make me insanely jealous. And some of the photos are really, really great. For example, Stephen Locke and Extreme Instability. But most of the time chasers just snap images from inside their car, on a road with cars flying by, powerlines, etc. They are just [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.