Airplane
(click to view on black // canon 5d mark ii, tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 30mm, iso 100, f/4 // buy print) You may know about my love for reflection photos like this one. What you may not know is that I’m kind of specific about when I shoot them. Like, if someone empties their swimming pool and it floods the street…I don’t rush outside with camera gear in hand. That just doesn’t get me going at all. But what does motivate me are storms. Of course right? And when it comes to reflections…I like the puddles of water leftover after a [...]
The Johnson family
When you are lucky enough to photograph the same families every year, it’s kind of fun to see how things change. Like with the Johnson family here. Last year baby Aly was a bundle of joy and sat there for an eternity letting me take pictures. And little Nick wanted nothing to do with me. This year, the opposite. Nick was a superstar model. He pretty much wanted to be in every picture. Aly? Well, she had her own agenda. I do love this family though. As I mentioned in the Nakamura post this week, Dave and Meribeth used to [...]
Life is Beautiful
(click to see on black // canon 5d mark ii, canon 35mm 1.3, f/1.6, iso 2000, 1/80 // buy print) It’s that time of the week again…time for Movie Title Wednesday. When I looked at this image thinking I’d use it for the weekly film series, the first title that popped into my head was Life is Beautiful. What’s kind of weird about that was I couldn’t remember a single reason WHY I connected a bicycle with that film. The movie came out in 1997, so that’s fourteen years ago and I don’t remember much about it at all. But [...]
First Friday is tonight!
(Canon Rebel XSi, 17-35mm, 17mm, ISO100, F10, six exposure HDR, Photomatix, CS5, Topaz Adjust) The First Friday art walk in downtown Phoenix happens tonight and for the first time I’ll be showing my work in a collaborative gallery for a month. I’m beyond excited and cannot wait for 6pm! My wonderful mom and step-dad are babysitting for us so that my wife and I can get out of the house and just enjoy a lovely evening meeting people, talking to people and enjoying our time spent together. If you are interested in coming, click right here for the flyer. Myself [...]
Glowing Rails
(Canon Rebel XSI, Tamron 17-35mm 2.8, 17mm, ISO 100, 8-exposures, F8) Back three weeks ago when I realized it was going to be a nice sunset, I’d drive 5 minutes and be in the middle of the desert. Now I’m scrambling for places in downtown Phoenix that will compliment the gorgeous skies we get down here in the evenings and mornings. My little family and I had been driving around downtown two weekends ago just exploring and seeing what kind of restaurants are there, shops, etc. Of course I was unconsciously more focused on things I could photograph, but when [...]
Reach for the Sky
“Reach for the skyyyyyyy.” Ah, a favorite line from one of my daughter’s favorite things to watch…Toy Story. I should note…I also love those movies. I find that I can still laugh at them over and over despite the amazing number of times we’ve watched it in our house! This is Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, a monolithic structure that immediately caught my eye on one of my first real exploratory drives down there. We’ve now lived down here for a few weeks now and I’m finding more opportunities to explore here and there and in the process of doing that, [...]
Light and Shadow
I put some legwork into this one. I walked and walked and walked around this parking garage at 5:30am in the morning looking for the perfect symmetry of lights…one hidden, one not, but feeling like both of them were pointed directly at me. I found a similar scene elsewhere, but I didn’t like the lack of detail on the garage floor, so I kept looking for some awesome tire tracks that would appear as if they were coming from where I was standing. And, I mean, to get the reflection of shiny cement on the left, but a shadow on [...]
Fringe Universe
Embrace your surroundings young man! Now that I’m spending almost all of my days in the downtown urban areas of Phoenix, I’m trying to evolve my vision a bit to be aware of things I may not normally look at. That process was certainly helped yesterday morning when we had a brief downpour around 5am, which left some amazingly clear puddles of water everywhere. I’m not sure if it just doesn’t rain all that much in the mornings here, or if you do get rain, it’s too cloudy for the pools of water to be that great looking…who knows. All [...]
Urban Stormchasing
So with my sudden move to the downtown Phoenix area, I vowed to at least ATTEMPT to capture some storms from the cement jungle down here. For a guy like me who never has his 17-35mm lens on anything BUT 17mm…it’s a struggle to find wide open spaces to really give an idea of what a storm is doing. Time to get creative…and prove to myself that I can be a photographer in any setting. I shot this last week during the rash of severe weather we had (It’s now up to EIGHT confirmed tornadoes in northern Arizona). The location [...]
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 [...]
Mike is a Phoenix Wedding Photographer based in Arizona and can be contacted via all the normal methods and then some.