Superman
(click to see this a bit larger with a darker border) Perhaps it may surprise you, or maybe it makes total sense, but when I was a kid and thought about what it would be like to have the powers of Superman…I didn’t care about x-ray or heat vision, or super strength, or super-breath or even super-speed. No, it was the flying. And the picture above is kind of what I dreamed about seeing if I was ever given the gift of flight. Soaring through the clouds, getting to look at them up-close…it was awesome to think about. So of [...]
Triple Threat
(Click to see a bit larger, with a nice, dark background) I’ve had the Canon 5D Mark II since around February and while it’s obviously an awesome camera, it’s going to be a lot of fun when it comes to lightning photography. Fun not just in the lack of a lot of noise for long exposures, but also with the full sensor allowing you a lot more freedom in cropping. Because of all those megapixels…it’s a lot easier to fix a shot when the lightning appears off-center and not in a good way. For example, this shot was taken with [...]
Up in the Air
(Click to see the image full-sized or so it fits your monitor) It’s another Movie Title Wednesday and this one comes from the sky and a Southwest Airlines window seat. I can’t tell you how lucky I was to sit on this site of the plane…the other side I believe didn’t get to see the action in the clouds that I did. First off…Up in the Air. A fantastic film starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. It’s such a brilliant film and really tells the story of what it’s like for some of these guys who are constantly [...]
First lightning of the year
I knew it would work out this way. After spending three days driving 2200 miles stormchasing the midwest…and getting essentially nothing…all it took was a vacation to Memphis and standing outside on the patio to get my first real lightning shots of the season. I did get a few in Nebraska two weeks ago, but they were from pretty far away and don’t really measure up to my standards *tee hee* I actually did take my bro-in-law’s car and drove about 1/4 mile down the road to a more open area to get the shot above, but most of the [...]
Storms from the air
Oh I’m on vacation, need a nap, don’t want to be on the computer too much, but I took a couple of shots of some severe weather in the midwest as we twisted and turned in the air to avoid all of it. No matter what I see on the ground…there is something so majestic about flying close to a towering thunderstorm. It’s hard to compete with that. If someone gave me the power to fly, I think that would be the first thing I’d do. Find me a storm and fly alongside it. Hope everyone has a great weekend!
A Nebraska supercell after dark
(Click to enjoy the storm a little bigger, almost like you were there. Okay, not really) Whew. It’s around 9am right now and I just landed in Phoenix a bit after 7am after flying out from Oklahoma City this morning. A long trip, I added around 2200 miles to the lovely Hyundai Santa Fe I rented and slept in the car two of the three nights for a total of five hours. I did actually rent a hotel on Tuesday night and it was some of the best sleep I’ve had in awhile. The bottom line from the trip was [...]
A new year begins
Well…here we go. It’s 2011 and time to forget whatever I did last year, start with a clean slate, try some new things and see where it all goes. Okay, kind of hard to do if you realize I posted the color version of this photo on Friday, the last day of 2010. Where is the new? There is a reason of course, and I think a good one. Last year I was inspired by Mitch Dobrowner’s storm photography. His work is absolutely incredible, powerful and spellbinding. He’s naturally become my favorite storm photographer. There is a picture in his [...]
Vegas Baby…Vegas
As many of you may know about me, I love to shoot the weather with the best composition I can come up with in whatever situation arises…however, sometimes all you can do is run up to the top of a parking garage and snap photos of a monster storm and not care about anything else. I was in Vegas two weeks ago during some good stormy weather, driving back to the airport with a colleague from another company, and I can’t even tell you how badly I wanted to pull the car over. I didn’t have a tripod or lightning [...]
Storms on Interstate 8
Ah…the first week in October will go down in my very own history books as the most awesome weather event of 2010. Storm after storm, organized systems, training…cloud structures I don’t get to see much out here…just fantastic fun. This is one of the first images I captured from that week. Around mid-day I noticed a storm building up down on the Arizona-Mexico border that was moving north. About an hour later it hadn’t died out at all, it just kept moving towards Interstate 8. You don’t see that much out here…usually storms build, die and the outflows created by [...]
Power
In my head I see the word “power” represented three times in this image. I shot this a few weeks back during the severe storms we were having here in Arizona. My buddy Bryan was with me at this spot and we were just marveling over the thundering clouds, the speed of their movement and the sun exploding with rays everywhere. I made several attempts to process this photo with HDR, but it never looked right and I ended up coming back to this version a few times. So can you see the three forms of power in the photo [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.