Ever since I started storm chasing, people tell me that they want to tag along. They want to see some AWESOME lightning. And then that turned into people wanting to learn how to capture lightning and dust storms. Eventually those requests also included lessons on timelapsing as well. So…why not do all of that at once? I’ve thought about it for a long time, planned it out in my head and so this summer I’m introducing for the very first time my Arizona Monsoon Photography Workshop! I’m super excited about this…nervous yes, but thrilled to share my passion with other photographers. A…

I’ve been wanting to do a promo reel for my business ever since I first saw one done for another photographer. But that was over three years ago and I knew I wasn’t ready. I honestly had no idea who I was at the time. It was late in 2011 when I felt like I finally began to find my true voice as a photographer. That story is something I will tell at another time. Today I want to talk about this video and how it’s the culmination of everything I’ve done with photography and my life up until this very…

(please click to view on black // canon 5d mark iii, canon 17-40mm f/4 l, 17mm, f/8, iso 200, 1/200th // buy print) When I chase in the central plains every spring, I do so with the intent of hopefully capturing a tornado someday, but mainly to get beautiful cloud structures that we don’t see much of out here in Arizona. And then yesterday happened. I had been out shooting snow on the Superstition Mountains in the early afternoon when my buddy Jeff started texting me about the lightning and hail raining down all over Scottsdale. In parts of that…

Well this is my baby. All the hard work timelapsing last summer is now in one single place. A short film, 19 minutes long, that is the payoff for all the hours, miles driven and time away from family in 2012. The video took me quite awhile to produce. Most of the timelapses were completed in one form or other last fall, but with the busy wedding and family portrait season upon me, I had to put it on the back burner for awhile. But slowly this year I’ve pieced it together, organized it, cleaned it up, found music and…

A powerful microburst fell onto the desert floor south of Gila Bend on August 13th, 2012. I was moments too late to capture the birth of it, but I timelapsed what I could. This should really give you an idea of how these things form out of nothing…a strong draft of air falls from the thunderhead and explodes in all directions. When this happens out in the desert, the dust picks up and you can see how the air ripples outwards like in a pool of water. This was a painstaking timelapse to finish because I sadly shot it at…

I realized the other day that I never posted this timelapse I shot of a dust storm being created unseen on the horizon and then hitting me an hour later. I thought I did, but ended up getting too busy! All summer I had been dying to capture a scene like this…where I started shooting way before you even saw any dust or anything. Having lived out here my entire life, I knew those storms would kick up some kind of dust cloud. So I took a chance and started snapping while the clouds were still far, far away. The…

On Friday evening I gave a 5-minute talk on chasing storms in front of 850ish people at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. It was all part of Ignite Phoenix, a very cool event and something I’m super proud to have been involved with. But it took a lot of encouragement, praying and rehearsing to get it done. I don’t like public speaking at all…it’s always been my biggest fear and my Achille’s Heal. But in the last year or two, with all this storm chasing stuff, the haboob video…I’ve suddenly been doing a lot more things like this. I…

The monsoon is winding down and last night I figured the brief sunset we had might have been a quiet farewell to the 2012 season. But this evening…we had a slow moving storm which was kind of “training” as it moved south, the top of it blowing off to the southeast. Caught in this timelapse is a microburst up in Deer Valley which caused all kind of damage to trees and a mobile home park. We technically have a few weeks left in the monsoon season, but the weather experts are talking about how it’s winding down. Tonight might have…

Watch FULL SCREEN in HD puhleeeez! Oh yeah…another haboob dust storm awesomeness rolled into Phoenix this evening and blanketed the town in dust for over an hour. The wall was about 50 miles long and the winds didn’t seem that strong, so the dust just lingered in the air forever. Blech. I regret not getting to this spot 10 minutes earlier, but thems the breaks kid. Met with some wedding clients right after this and then flew up the Beeline and captured some lightning. All in a days work.

Before my tire went flat from some unseen predator buried in the Arizona desert, I timelapsed this wall of dust as it crossed Interstate 8 and rolled into Casa Grande. It also came up Interstate 10 behind me and spread into Phoenix. Another year of the haboob out in Arizona…crazy how many of these storms we’ve had. More severe weather on tap for today, I’m hitting the road right now.