The Caterpillar
I rarely take photos of construction vehicles unless there is something interesting going on in the sky. I’ve seen so many awesome HDR photos of these kinds of subjects, including my buddy Brian’s awesome shot using a fisheye lens, but I just haven’t done too many myself. I found this Caterpillar Motor Grader was on site at the wastewater plant up in Williams, Arizona when I was there last week on a service call. With the stormy skies behind it, the puddles of rain and the awesome rusty features on the vehicle itself, I had to snap some brackets. The [...]
Stormy weather ahead
A couple of days ago we had some fairly severe weather develop across Arizona. Storms dumping a lot of rain and producing 60+mph winds. The cell on the left of this grouping was actually severe warned a bit after this. Damaging winds, tons of rain…good stuff. I shot this in the middle of Gilbert Road just south of Hunt Highway looking north. They are actually way across town on the very far side of Phoenix, but it’s amazing how clear the skies were that you could actually see the rain falling. Again…my love affair of roads continues. This is a [...]
One of my favorite spots: Lost Dutchman Road
This scene may not be a stranger to some of you. It most definitely isn’t for me. Since I’ve started seriously chasing storms earlier this year, I’ve probably taken photographs from this spot 10 times? I can’t help it. The road and cliffs stay the same, but the light, the shadows and the clouds always change. I’ll probably throw something together someday with all the different views of this place over the course of a year. I photographed this last Monday while out with my daughter. She was in her car seat, watching Toy Story on the DVD player and [...]
Flowers and Storms on Deer Park Lake
You may be wondering where the heck the lake is, but I’m kind of standing in it. At least, that’s where it should be. Sometimes there is water and sometimes not. I think the snow melt earlier in the year floods this place, forms the lake, and then once summer hits…you get fields of gold just like this. We were driving to Williams for my real job and noticed more and more flowers on the way up…and when we passed this wide open area…I knew we’d come back to it on the way home. What made it even more awesome [...]
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 [...]
More storms over the Superstitions
Yesterday was supposed to be a 60% chance of rain in town, but we ended up with only a few afternoon storms to the east of Phoenix and nothing else all night. My little girl and I headed out to the Superstition Mountains after picking her up from the sitter and saw some beautiful clouds to go along with the stunning vistas of those great cliffs and peaks. This is looking northward from the southern side of Apache Junction. We weaved our way through the housing up there to find a spot devoid of man-made objects to get this shot [...]
Wandering with the Arizona monsoon: On the Apache Trail
What’s amazing about Phoenix is that stuff like this can be seen on just a short drive east of town. Now, it’s not Grand Falls or anything spectacular in the sense of landmarks or stunning vistas…but if you take the time to stop, get out of the car, walk down a short path and look around…you can see beautiful scenes everywhere. This was a short distance from a pull-off on Apache Trail, a road that takes you to Canyon Lake and eventually Roosevelt Lake. My buddy Bryan (Whom I made famous yesterday) and I made all kinds of stops along [...]
Stormchasing with my buddy Bryan
Nothing is more fun doing by yourself that is even MORE fun if you have someone with you who is just as enthusiastic as you are. I have a healthy obsession with stormchasing. Bryan said one day that he wouldn’t mind joining me sometime…to learn how to take lightning shots, HDR brackets and see some cool stuff. Well, when I asked him two weeks ago and then showed up at his house, I had no idea how excited he actually was. Not only did he have his camera, tripod and gear all out…he had an extra pair of shoes in [...]
A monsoon sunset down in Casa Grande
I’ve learned a bit about good sunset pictures in the last year. Normally, a nice silhouette of a sunset doesn’t work unless you have some kind of iconic or amazing structure on the horizon. A beautiful sunset photograph usually has some sort of interesting foreground element to go with it…be it a lake, pond, rocks, building, whatever. When I am out stormchasing, I never know where I’m are going to be. I just end up where the storms and clouds are. So when you start seeing a sunset forming like the one above and you’re driving down the highway at [...]
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 [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.