Tag: Phoenix

Tempe Town Lake

by Ken Mickel, posted in Landscapes, Waterscapes

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A sunset photo of the Mill Avenue Bridge over Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona. This is a man made lake created by damming the Salt River. To the left of the bridge is Tempe, Arizona. Then just to the right is the City of Phoenix.

I wanted to create a long exposure image to both smooth out the water on the lake and capture some movement of the clouds. Due to slow moving clouds, I had to use an 83 second exposure to capture the movement I wanted.

For me, I really liked all the contrasts this image displays. First, there is the contrast of the light and shadows. Then the clouds look like an explosion of energy to contrast with the smoothness of the water. The capture of motion also contrasts nicely with the solid standing bridge.

You may view a larges size version of this image on Flickr

 

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Moody Desert

by Ken Mickel, posted in Arizona Desert, Landscapes

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Walking around the desert looking to make an interesting landscape image when you have grayed out skies, can be quite challenging. However, I did come home with this image worthy to work with. I felt the dead tree in the foreground along with the sun bleeding through the clouds worked great with the mood of this shot.  I did an HDR merge in Lightroom then played around with tonal adjustments to come up with this. I also reduced saturation a little using the HSL panel. To finish it off, I used the radial filter to brighten up the dead tree a little bit along with using the adjustment brush to dodge and burn in other areas of the image. Photographed west of Phoenix, Arizona.

You may view a larger size version here on Flickr.