Fire in the Sky

The other night, I was about to head to bed and realized that there was a bit of alight show going on outside.  So, I grabbed my camera, hopped in my truck, and headed up on the hill above our house to watch the show.  Turns out, it was a pretty good show.

A Little Bit Of Catch Up

It has been a very busy few weeks around here.  We have finished our re-location and are working on getting settled in.  While I've managed to get in a little shooting here and there, I haven't had time to do any proper editing, so I am way behind.  I have done a bit of processing on my laptop so I figured I would post a quick collection of images to catch up a bit.  I will get around to full posts from each of these shoots one of these days.

These first three images were shot from the road in front of my house.  I had stepped outside to move my truck and happened to look up to see the milky way.

We've had some pretty crazy storms roll through here over the last couple of weeks.  I haven't had much time to go out chasing, but did manage to get in a couple of shots the other night.

I had a friend in town last week from California.  He doesn't get a lot of opportunities to shoot the stars, so I took him up to the hills above my house to practice for our excursion to the desert the following night.

Here's a couple of shots from our trip to the Sun Tunnels.  We had a lot of fun and came home with some great images.  We also met someone out there, a first for me.  I'll tell you more about that later.

Lightning

The other week, I actually managed to be in town when we had a fantastic storm roll through the valley.  I was able to head out and catch the tail end of it.  This was my favorite image from the night.

More Lightning

This is one of the frames used to create the composite in my last post.  I really liked the mood of the images and did a little work to bring it out.  The black and white conversion really adds to the feel.

Lightning

Every summer, we get some pretty fantastic lightning storms around here.  While I've gotten some decent images in the past, It's been a while since I've gotten one I've really loved.  The other night, we had a good storm roll through and I was able to get out in it for a bit.  One of my challenges has been finding a decent spot to get an interesting foreground.  I live in a pretty flat area of the valley, with not a lot of interesting spots for a lightning shot.  Well, The storm was moving through quickly, so we picked a spot that looked okay and got set up for the show.  This is a composite image, created by stacking 12 separate images.  Individually, the images weren't too exciting.  Together, they are pretty fantastic.  I still need to find a better location, but I like how this one turned out.

Lightning!

I had come in from mowing the lawn and was catching up on email when my daughter came downstairs to tell me she had been watching the lightning out her window.  We quickly grabbed our cameras and headed out to the back yard.  We had a nice, front row seat to a 360° show.  After a few minutes, we were interrupted by the sprinklers, so we had to move to the driveway.  We got in a few decent strikes when the rain started so we moved to the garage and got a few more shots in as the storm quickly moved on.  All in all, it wasn't a bad shoot and we never even put on our shoes.

Images were created with the Canon 7D and the Canon 14mm f/2.8L II lens.

Lightning