These were all taken on October 12th,  some of them downtown, the sunset ones from around my side of town.

The two sunset ones are probably the best, but I figured I would post them all for you guys to check out.

Enjoy!

This first one is just come high clouds in an interesting formation, but the real neat part is the two birds way up there.

This is a shot of Squaw Peak from downtown Phoenix.

Some cris-crossing high clouds

Sunset over South Mountain

I almost missed this one, but pulled over the car and grabbed the shot. Absolutely beautiful.

Jina is an amazing woman and always supports me in everything I do. So of course when I invited her and Lyla along last night to take some sunset pictures, she was right there.

Just having them with me was such a blast. It’s always better for us to be together than apart.

We trekked out to Queen Creek Rd. just west of Price Rd. and pulled into a dirt road that opened up into this giant field with a great view of South Mountain.

While I got some decent photos, my favorite is the first one below. Jina and Lyla wandered into the picture by standing on that dirt road, and I noticed that the sun was lighting up the “edges” of Jina and Lyla, especially their hair. So I turned the camera to face them and snapped one of my favorite photos ever.

And if you want to see the best of the rest, here you go:

Here are some recent photos, all of which should also appear in my official gallery page: Mike’s Gallery. I’ve also joined JPG Magazine, so I have a profile page over there now too.

These first two are looking towards South Mountain at sunset.

This one is just a glance at some blowing clouds through Chandler.

The next few are sunrise photos over the San Tan mountains.

Took this one at noon as the sun was straight up behind some clouds. You can see the circle of the sun hiding behind them.

In the meantime, I thought I’d post a few photos that I’ve taken the last few weeks and also introduce a new photo gallery I’ve created to show off some of my better stuff.

To check it out, just click on this link right here. I’ll be adding a better link up top sometime soon. Hope you like it. You can make it full screen if you want. To navigate around, there is a View Gallery link at the bottom left that brings up sub-folders of image galleries.

Below are some of the shots you’ll see in the gallery. You can click on these and download them as wallpaper if you like any of them.

Jina made the smart decision last night to record all of 12 News this morning, so we actually had it on the DVR. My friend Julie on Facebook was watching and let me know she saw it…I had no idea!

So here it is, for your enjoyment…captured in horrible quality on my Flip *grin*

(impressed they pronounced my name perfectly!)

Epic in my world of course…because I know I can do better with some better tools, but for a little point-and-shoot camera, this is about as good as it gets.

I saw the skies starting to light up over Ocotillo and so I set up shop across Riggs. Of course, the lightning started to get close again, so I jumped in the car and had the tripod up against the inside of the car door and with the window rolled down, I grabbed the shot below.

There is a decent chance it might actually appear on Channel 12 news tonight at 4:30 pm. Also, if you want to help me out a bit, you can go vote it up over on Wunderground.com. I’m hoping it gets to an Approver’s Choice over there, but that’s a tough accomplishment.

Hope you enjoy the photo, I’ll be making a few Wallpapers of this and some others I took, which you can see below the lightning shot. It was also a stunning night with the sun setting and monsoons building, so I grabbed a few other shots.

These are the rest below…a nice sunset, and a few photos that I enhanced just a bit to bring out the colors and darkness.

However, in the meantime, I’ve taken some of my favorite weather shots, which include clouds, lightning, dust storms, etc., and edited them into some nice wallpaper images. I turned most into black & whites and enhanced some of the colors to make them a bit more vivid.

I’ve also added my silly little watermark for the fun of it, because I see a lot of photographers do it.

The page with all the wallpaper photos is located right here. You can also get to it anytime by the Wallpaper link up top.

Below is a sample.

Probably haven’t said this before (and it may seem cheesy), but oftentimes when I take a second to relax and watch a massive lightning show and hear the rain pouring on the roof…I always thank God for creating this for us. It’s truly amazing what nature can do.

So ANYWAYS, last night was great. I thought we might get something, then it looked like it slipped southeast of us to Tucson, but then I noticed a suddenly development in Coolidge. This was north of where the other stuff had gone to, so I had a sneaky suspicion it just might continue to go that way.

An outflow boundary from the storms to the east came through town, coupled with a system moving in from the north, and we had a massive devlepment over the east valley. I saw the storm coming from the north, so I set up shop just across Riggs Road in a large agriculture field.

The first time out, I got a few small bolts of lightning on camera, but mostly I was proud of a dust storm shot down Riggs with the moon in the background:

There was one good lightning strike from this first batch of storms I got:

A few minutes later, an even bigger dust storm rolled through and I got a few more shots.

Can barely see this car pointed at me.

Without much warning, the storms I was watching off in the distant northeast suddenly got closer, then a bolt of lightning exploded just northWEST of me from where it had been quiet before. Time to get home. I have a little bit of a fear of getting struck *grin*

It started pouring not too long after and we got some great rain and lightning. It disapated though and I noticed more storms developing north of us and they were beautifully coming our way. One cell in particular was huge and dark red, and located over Tempe. So I went back out to a different spot just west on Cooper and Riggs to catch it.

As I sat watching, things were okay, but the lightning started getting closer, so I set up shop INSIDE my car and was blessed to capture the three shots below, which are probably my three best lightning photos to date.

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After that, it was time to go…and that turned out to be a good decision. The skies opened up and we got even more rain than before, the lightning was much closer and it turned out to be even better than the first wave.

All told last night, we had about .43 inches of rain at my house, a wind gust up to 20.5mph (nothing fancy) and the temps cooled off to around 77 degrees. Beautiful night!

Right now, the hurricane is teetering on a Category Five, the strongest type of hurricane. Baja California is bracing for their first real hurricane threat since Juliette in 2001, which dumped something like 17 inches of rain on Cabo San Lucas and caused mudslides, etc.

For us in Arizona…the storm track has it headed DIRECTLY for the state. Not veering left or right, but going straight on into the desert.

What does this mean?

Well, it’s not like it will be a hurricane when it gets here, but it will have tons of moisture left over once it breaks up over Baja and then the mainland of Mexico. Coupled with our heat, this moisture could fire up and create some amazing thunderstorms and contains tons and tons of rain. Don’t plan on working on that tan this weekend.

Of course, it could suddenly veer off course or die out quicker than expected and thus we wont get much, but the chances look good.

The rains are supposed to start up possibly as early as Thursday night, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being the best chances. I can only hope for a nice weather evening on Friday before we head out *grin*

We’ll likely be driving in rain to San Diego on Saturday morning. Here are the latest pictures of Jimena’s storm track and the actual hurricane itself. If you want to read more technical stuff on Jimena, check out Jeff Master’s blog.

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As an example, last year Julio’s remnants moved into Arizona during monsoon season and caused some fairly severe thunderstorms. If you recall the ASU football bubble practice facility was completely destroyed during a very bad storm that produced almost 100mph winds and left a tornado-like signature on the radar.

I remember that night well because the lightning from a storm that hit us in Chandler never seemed to stop flashing. I’d never seen anything like it. It was non-stop flashes of lightning for almost thirty minutes.

Hurricane Jimena is now south of Baja California and is a category 3 hurricane. That’s halfway to a very bad category 5 and while it’s not expect to get to a 5, it may get to a 4.

The prediction for the storm is basically a path straight up the Baja. When it hits there, it will drop to a category 1 and then fade to a tropical storm, then depression.

However, once it hits Baja, who knows where it may go. Some of the computer models show it nicking southern Arizona and moving into New Mexico and Texas. Will this be enough moisture to bring us some nice rain?

I’m always hopeful for something like this because it just adds a little excitement to our monsoon season, which, let’s face it, has been pretty awful this year.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, here are some current pics of Jimena.