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…

(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…

Oh how I longed to live closer to the downtown area so I could explore taking shots like this one. Long exposures over freeways with loads of vehicles. Although, I realized when I look at this that it could basically have been taken on any ol’ freeway with a pedestrian overpass! But I love it because it’s downtown Phoenix! I also love the movie Speed, which is the name of the film for my weekly Movie Title Wednesday entry. I don’t care how much people hate Keanu Reeves and his acting (or lack of) style…I usually find him entertaining. If…

The Hillis family have pictures taken every year around their 8-year old Isaac’s birthday, just in time for Christmas and the holidays.  I was lucky enough to get to shoot them this time around in a quick little meetup in downtown Gilbert. For those families on a budget or looking for some simple group shots of the family for X-Mas cards, I’m doing short, 30-minute sessions for $75. If interested, let me know via the contact form on the Portraits page! Amazingly, we still squeezed in a decent amount of poses and even a wardrobe change into half-an-hour. A beautiful family…

“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,…

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…

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…

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…

Well, it’s another Movie Title Wednesday and this time it may be more subtle than most, but there is a quick story behind it. Super quick. “Hey wife, what do you think of this photo?” “I like the signs.” “There are signs? Oh yeah…wait a second…” And thus we now have a title for the picture.  I love it when a plan comes together. Signs was one of my more favorite M. Night films, and it was probably one of his last good ones. It had some great music, spooky moments and a cool ending where everything tied up nice…

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…