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 [...]
Twister
Today is Movie Title Wednesday and I’ve never used the same move twice in over a year doing this series. So I probably should have saved this film for next spring when I hit the road out in the Midwest and see my first tornado, but by then none of you will even remember this anyways. So I went with it today! First off, Twister was pure awesome for weather and storm chasing nuts. Sure, it romanticized, glamorized and added all of those hollywood elements to the science of storm chasing. I know those hard core chasers who had been [...]
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 [...]
Those dark skies
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, f/16, iso 100, 1/15th // buy print) I was hoping to post a timelapse tutorial today, but I’m on the road and have to get up very, very early Tuesday morning, so I didn’t have time to get all the information together like I wanted. So instead, you get another stormchasing image! I highly suggest you click on the image today, it seems the WordPress-resized version makes the tree really, really dark, whereas the full-sized shows you a bit more detail. This was shot back on [...]
The Dance
(click to see on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 70-210mm f/4, 205mm, f/5.6, iso 400, 30 sec // buy print) The one fun thing about stormchasing…whether it’s photographing monstrous thunderheads, dust storms, or lightning strikes…is that it’s always different. Something new, something exciting…something you learn. For instance…lightning strikes. They are never the same. Which is why I love it so much. And even when two lightning strikes almost appear to be mirror reflections of each other, they are still different. Like in this photo. But it’s still kind of interesting to look at from a sort of “un-microscopic” [...]
Purple Rain
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 50mm 1.4, f/6.3, iso 200, 25 sec // buy print) Let me just get this out of the way. It’s Movie Title Wednesday. I needed something to go with this shot from Tuesday night. Purple Rain. I mean, what else could possibly work right? Although I will say this…it’s obvious to me, but I had my buddy Jacob Lucas try to guess it last night and he didn’t come close to the right title. In fact, he didn’t even know that was rain falling. So maybe it’s just me. [...]
The Arizona Twister
(please click to enjoy a view on black!) If dust devils were tornadoes, Arizona would be the capital of the world. During these hot summer days, you can drive down the long interstates through the desert and see these towering twisters of dust almost anywhere. They can be tiny things, barely 10 feet tall and they sputter out after minutes. Or they can be long-lasting, tornado-like vortices that sometimes make you do a double-take to just make sure it’s not an actual twister. While out stormchasing on Labor Day, my buddy Ken and I spotted this elephant trunk-like dust devil [...]
Lightstorm
(Please click to view on black) Sometimes the weather forecasters predict a big storm to hit in the coming days, only to either be wrong or off a bit on the timing. But for the last 2-3 days, the National Weather Service kept saying a low pressure system would move into SW Arizona on Labor Day creating some intense storms and lots of rain. Which is exactly what happened. I had been planning on an all-day, noon-to-midnight stormchasing event for Labor Day and was pumped when Monday morning nothing in the forecast had changed. My buddy Ken met me at [...]
Downpour on the San Tans
(click, see larger, dark background, you get the idea) It’s kind of interesting if you ever go back to just wipe out old RAW files that you realize you’ll never, ever process, so may as well just recover some disk space. While I do usually end up deleting a ton of files, sometimes you discover those that you just plain forgot about. And at the same time, you may have improved your processing techniques enough that suddenly an image that didn’t “move” you before, suddenly speaks to you in a new way. This shot is from waaaay back on August [...]
Red Dawn
(click to view larger on a black border…just looks better) A break from all the lightning and storms…time for Movie Title Wednesday! One of those movies that I just have to watch if I see it on the TV on a Saturday afternoon is Red Dawn. Granted, I haven’t seen it on the TV much recently and probably have watched it through only a handful of times (the last time being a very long time ago), but it’s still such a fun movie. World War II, Russians attack, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson…hiding out in the woods, a resistance, [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.