The lake that wasn’t there
Canon Rebel XSI, Tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, ISO 100, F9, Six exposures, HDR An amazing weather system moved through Arizona earlier this week. In fact, a total of FIVE confirmed tornadoes hit northern Arizona on Wednesday. That is unheard of. What is also seen on very, very rare occasions is standing water in the middle of a flat desert. This “lake” didn’t exist earlier in the day and within about six hours of heavy rains and hail, it formed out of nowhere. My buddy Bryan and drove down this little road to capture some awesome storm clouds about 90 minutes [...]
Westward Ho!
(Canon Rebel XSi, Tamron 17-35mm, 2.8, 17mm, ISO 100, 3 exposures) As most of my many, many fans know (said tongue-in-cheek), I moved to downtown Phoenix last weekend, which opened up a whole new world of photographic options for me. But one of my passions is capturing the weather in it’s various forms, so being in a location with tall buildings and limited views off into the distance…well, it’s going to be a challenge for me. And that’s what I want this to be. I still want to scoot off into the desert to chase storms, but I’d also like [...]
Dumbo
Sometimes you look at a photo and the title of it just hits you. I knew this was the one for today’s Movie Title Wednesday ongoing series! If you can’t spot Dumbo in the photo, I don’t know if anyone can help you *grin* This is basically right out of my RAW editor with some processing done to the contrast and RGB coloring. I love to take time to compose shots, set down the tripod, grab a bunch of brackets and then spend a few hours processing that shot. However, I also just LOVE random photos of clouds and storm [...]
Flight of the Navigator
Okay, I had two choices tossing around in my head for the title today in my weekly Movie Title Wednesday post. The first was obviously Close Encounters, but it’s so overdone and overused whenever someone has a picture of a spaceship-like cloud formation. So I skipped it. Flight of the Navigator…wow, for some reason this was a movie that made an impact on me growing up. Maybe it was the idea of a kid being whisked away, his parents having no idea he, ahem, traveled through time, and now appears to them eight years later, not having aged at all [...]
Monsoons and Barbed Wire
I’ve been holding onto this one since late July for some reason. I just wasn’t sure about it. I actually have a version of it without the barbed wire, but for some reason I kind of like this a little better. You get a sense of what is happening in the background anyways, the cactus, the vegetation and the monsoon storms brewing in the background. I had taken the original photo, was about to walk away and realized I liked the rusty old barbed wire and wanted to see what I could do with it. This is an HDR from [...]
Desert Cornfields
One of the stranger things you see when you roam the Arizona desert is the occasional summer cornfield. You just don’t EXPECT a dry, arid climate to be a place you’d want to grow corn…but of course, that’s why I’m not a farmer and mostly keep cool inside my air conditioned house. Back towards the end of August, we had a few days with fast-moving, severe storms blow through the state and this is a capture of one of them. These are the San Tan Mountains, a subject in many of my photographs. On the right horizon you can already [...]
Death and Birth
Simple scene. A desert hill, some foreground growth and a monsoon storm growing on the horizon. But that’s the simplicity I love sometimes. I tend to look for super dramatic, wide-angle, busy scenes…but occasionally I find the lack of drama just as awesome. The main element in the foreground is a dead tree of some sort…it almost looks like a bird sitting on one of the right top branches, but I think it’s just a snapped branch. There are a few cacti and of course, the growing storm behind it all. I dig B&W and love silhouettes…I always find it [...]
An old, rusty water trough
This shot is from way back in May of this year. Sometimes I take brackets, smash them into an HDR shot, they end up being removed from my laptop to save disk space and get lost on my backup drives until I stumble across them eventually. I was browsing my HDR library on the backup disk last night and found this little guy sitting there. Yet another gorgeous scene from my trip to Northern Arizona. This was on the way to Grand Falls and I just had to turnaround, drive down a dirt road in the rain in my little [...]
Cloudy skies over Phoenix
Looking at the above shot, you might think it was taken with an iPhone and processed with that awesome software iPhone photos use. No, I don’t have one, but I want one someday. Just praying Verizon actually gets the iPhone in January. But no, that photo was actually taken with my Rebel XSi out of the 19th floor window of my office building. They are dirty, dirty, dirty windows. But I kind of like it sometimes, especially when you chose to process photos with a sort of faded, older look to them. These aren’t anything special…meaning I didn’t take them [...]
Down that dark road
I’m lucky to have a few great friends at work and one of them is Jesse. He’s a car guy, loves to go “wheeling” every Friday night and would go out of his way to help you install a new car stereo, not to mention a bazillion other things. A week or so ago we had to drive up to Williams for work, which is something we love doing despite the 3-3.5 hour drive time. Especially in the summer when it’s 110 in Phoenix, but a cool 75-80 in the gorgeous pine country of northern Arizona. He’s such a good [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.