The city in the water
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, f/5.0, iso 100 // buy print) There are two very different storm seasons in Phoenix. In the summer, it’s all monsoons and thunderstorms. The rest of the year, it’s just random winter-ish storms that roll through. The summers bring lightning, the winters bring rain. So in the summers, I go outside of the Phoenix area to chase the weather. In the winters, I head downtown. One thing I really ended up finding amazingly fun and rewarding was pointing my camera downwards at these giant puddles of [...]
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 [...]
Back to the Future
(please click the image so it fills your screen in the event you might have smaller monitor like I do. Also a dark border looks nice with it) Twice this year I’ve been able to do some stormy sunset reflection shots downtown and I have to say, I absolutely LOVE this kind of photography. But first off, this is Movie Title Wednesday and we’re going with Back to the Future this week! I remember seeing Back to the Future for the first time as a kid at my aunt’s house. God bless her for renting it that night. My brother [...]
Fire ahead
Man I had a tough time last night. I had never been up to Lake Pleasant northwest of Phoenix, but that kind of where this storm was headed, so I thought it would be pretty awesome to capture the sunset glowing over a lake. But I didn’t know the area very well, so by the time the sunset was arriving, I was still trying to find out how to get down to the water. Plus the gas light started coming on intermittently, and with a 1994 4Runner, you aren’t going to have a ton of miles left to find a [...]
From Within
(click to view in lightbox…the border really adds a lot) As I said at the start of the week, I had been planning on not really blogging since I have this awesome guest series going on right now. And on a side note, thank you to EVERYONE who participated and made it a success. Been so much fun. Can’t wait for tomorrow’s conclusion. But anyways, I couldn’t help myself. Had to post today. So Tucson, Arizona, is where it’s at. Those of us in Phoenix tend to just wait around, maybe drive to Casa Grande on some nights to get [...]
Lightning strike in Sedona
With all the excitement of this past week, I haven’t posted a blog or a photo since Tuesday night. For awhile I was too busy to think about it, then I couldn’t do it if I wanted to because the website had crashed numerous times and finally we had to put it on a different server with a static page. Well, now I’ve moved to a faster, more reliable host and I’m back in the mix of blogging! It’s amazing how much I missed it! I want to write a lot about what happened with the haboob video, the viral-ness [...]
My 2011 stormchasing trip in 7 minutes
(To view this video in HD, click right here to go to Vimeo…a lot better quality. I had a different post set for today, but the clouds this morning and the humid-ish area has me excited for the monsoon season here in Arizona which could make an appearance as early as tomorrow! I finally finished working on the video from my stormchasing trip back on May 9-11. Most of the video I shot was kind of boring since the a lot of the trip turned out to be a bust, but I put together the best clips I had. I [...]
The electric man
You know how you look at clouds and see shapes and animals and people and anything else that somehow pops into your head? I almost never do that, and when it comes to lightning, this would be the first time. But in looking at this strike I shot in Memphis, I feel like I’m watching some giant man walking right to left, with a bunch of spindly arms stretching everywhere. If only I had captured him before he walked behind the tree! The monsoon season has “officially” started here in Arizona and while it’s unbelievably hot already (115 this week), [...]
Snow on the Four Peaks
Back on the very last day of December, I posted a picture of the Four Peaks mountain range fresh after a snow storm hit them. You can see that one below. I didn’t process the one above for awhile after that, but eventually got around to working on it. I’m glad I did because it ended up being kind of cool for me to really see how fast things can change when viewing a landscape. The top photo occurred exactly 7 minutes and 42 seconds after the one below. I moved spots between the two captures…going lower I believe for [...]
Static
I’m kind of anal when it comes to the composition of lightning shots. I like a certain look, a certain kind of strike, a certain kind of framing and if I don’t have it, I’ll just throw out the image. Examples are capturing only HALF a strike. You were aimed in the general area but the bolt obviously has a lot going on off-camera that you missed. That’s not good enough for me. Anyways, this bolt has a pretty intense tendril going off camera, but for the most part, the entire strike is in the center of the frame. It’s [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.