These train tracks are something special to me. We’re moving on Saturday to downtown Phoenix, which is around 27 miles from this spot in the photo above. I doubt I will be seeing them anytime soon unless next year’s monsoon chasing somehow leads me this way. Or maybe I’ll be on this side of town and swing by, but regardless, it’s no longer going to be a 5-minute drive from my house. I took the above photo two nights ago as a way of saying farewell to them. I actually hadn’t been by this way in awhile and it felt…

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…

Waaaaay back in December of last year I went on a little photowalk across the city. Started in Tempe at sunset, ended up in downtown Phoenix. It was my first time really shooting the urban environment after dark, and I think I’d have a lot more fun now and know how to even snap the photos better. I’ll be moving down this way in a matter of days so I expect I’m going to invade and conquer this place known as “urban” Phoenix and give it the HDR stylizing that it quite frankly deserves. This building is…well, I have no…

If I remember correctly, I took this back on July 1st while sitting out on this road praying that the monsoons would start up soon. Nothing happened of course, but the clouds were beautiful, lazy and fluffy. I believe this was also one of my first images with the newly acquired Tamron 17-35 2.8. I love the glass, it’s sharp and the aspherical nature of it has been a lot of fun. These are the San Tan Mountains, which you’ve probably seen in quite a few of my photos since this spot is only 1.5 miles from my house. I…

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…

The title of this photo has a couple of meanings. The first being the fact that a little storm system which moved through Arizona the last two days could end up being the final bit of weather we get from the monsoon season (it officially ends on Sep. 30th). Despite all the stormy clouds during the day, my week has been quite busy and this was the only shot I ended up with. So in another way, this is likely my last monsoon photo until next year. Of course, there is always that slight chance something could pop up before…

You know those kinds movies right? You are lazying around on a Saturday or Sunday, you flip the channels, you see THAT movie, the movie that you’ll now start watching, no matter how long it’s been on, and you get sucked in each and every time. Field of Dreams is one of those for me. There are so many cool moments in the film that build off each other, it’s easy to get pulled right into the plot. Plus, unless you are a brick-wall-of-emotions, it kinds of gets you choked up right? “Hey dad…you wanna have  a catch?” Oh man,…

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…

Now that we’re moving to downtown Phoenix, I’m really going to miss being close to places like this that are just a quick jaunt from where I currently reside. The Gila River Indian Reservation has been kind of my stomping ground this past summer for a lot of my storm chasing adventures. Once I move, getting to a spot like this will take about 30 minutes longer. Still, I can’t wait to see what is in store for me downtown and the surrounding areas. I know for certain that South Mountain has some hidden treasures to offer and I’ll be…

When I was in Holland recently for work, we stayed at the Hotel de Colse Hoeve. The rooms were a little sketchy…the hotel is built on old farm land, with farms on either side, so there are numerous bugs around, in the hallways and in the first room I was assigned to. I eventually moved and the next one was perfect. But as a stuck-up, pompous, city dude, fighting the bugs wasn’t my idea of a fun time at a hotel. However, everything else was awesome. The staff was amazing, the restaurant right out of Top Chef and the location…