Monsoon chasing on the Apache Trail
This is a little bit of an older shot taken about a month ago in July. I really wanted to post the sunset photo from last night, but I’m having trouble with getting the colors to show up correctly once I upload them to the web, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. Any help or advice would be appreciated. I took this photo on the Apache Trail road when I was out stormchasing with my buddy Brian. I thought the powerlines would ruin the shot, but for some reason I like them, along with the road of course. [...]
Downpour over the San Tan Mountains
I’ve been wanting to get a shot like this all summer. I hope to get another. A storm cloud, kind of isolated, dropping rain on the desert and you can see everything from the ground to the top of the cloud. There is something amazing about seeing a giant, floating cumulus cloud with rain falling from the bottom. Almost like the rain is holding the entire contraption up in the air. I could have gotten a shot without the road or powerlines (and I did), but I like the way the lines from each create a little perspective on just [...]
Canyon Lake Monsoon Panoramic
Sometimes it’s hard to capture all the detail you want in a single image, so you have to go for the panoramic. I definitely recommend clicking on the photo to see the larger version. This picture is from my recent stormchasing adventure with my buddy Bryan. We drove down Apache Trail towards Canyon Lake and stopped just a little short of it to climb to the top of this hill to see what we could see. Yes, I’ll verify that Bryan warned me that we were watching an approaching monsoon thunderstorm and the hill we chose to shoot from also [...]
An old feed mill in Ogalalla, Nebraska
I have a feeling that if you dumped me in Nebraska for a week, I’d still come home wishing I had snapped just a few more photos. If you follow my work, you know I stormchased in Nebraska a few weeks ago. I drove from Denver to Ogalalla, Nebraska late at night to set up for the storms the following day. Never heard of this town, never been there before obviously, and it was just the next stop on the road with hotels and me dying for sleep at 2am. The next day I had a lot of time to [...]
The light rail bridge in Tempe, AZ
I’ve been playing around a bit with my HDR processing methods after snapping photos in downtown Tempe Saturday night. I was ending up with a lot of noise in my shots and had to find alternative ways of getting the job done. This one above was in the same boat, but I ended up loving how it looked anyways. There is a lot of “grain” as I like to call it in the shot above. The sky, the clouds, the underneath of the bridge…all have a lot of dirty noise going on. I felt it looked a little more abstract [...]
Sunset on the ol’ railroad tracks
I’ve taken quite a few photographs from this spot over the last 6 months. It’s amazing to think it’s only about 2 miles from my house (for now, until we move). I rarely try to dip from the same well more than once, but this place is fond to me. And I do try to go there for different reasons when I do. And as far as I know, they are rarely, if ever, used because I’ve stood there for a long time and never have seen a train. Last night we had some rainy-ish looking clouds roll through and [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.