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This Roman Catholic chapel is built into the buttes of Sedona, Arizona thanks to a local rancher and sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude. It was Frank Floyd Wright's son Lloyd however who constructed it . It too 18 months to build at a cost of 300 thousand US dollars. It was built in 1956. Arizonans voted the Chapel to be one of the Seven man-made wonders of Arizona. Now a tourist destination, it receives over 2 million visitors a year.
Imagine if you will, my surprise when I saw this lake in the middle of the desert for the first time. It seemed so odd to see a lake in the middle of the desert, surrounded by saguaros and cacti but it was so very beautiful and quite captivating. I visited this exact spot last year and actually captured fantastic shot (see “Pleasantly Arizona”). This time however my goal was to capture lake view at sunset. I arrived about an hour before the sunset hour so that I’d have time to find a composition but that proved to be more difficult than I had expected. Gosh, saguaros can sometimes be hard to photograph because they line up with one another, making them look like a massive oversized tree. Oh, and then there’s the “fuzzy bushes” (as I call them) that seem to be everywhere; destroying the scene by blocking the valued components of my composition or even blocking everything! Eventually though, I came across this composition. The foreground elements in this photograph are very important to the overall composition of this photo. The dead tree and two saguaro skeletons lying on the ground lead your eyes from the bottom (entry point) of this photograph to the saguaro trees. From there your eyes are drawn up to the distant mountains, then over to the sun kissed clouds and then finally down the dark ridge on the right, which then leads you back to center. This “line” of view (if you will) is called the “Golden Ratio”, a circular compositional tool used by many photographers and artists. This photograph is a HDR image, meaning I took multiple images of the same scene using different exposure values, and then combined them into a single image. As a result I captured the full range of tonal values (darks and lights) within the scene. Lake pleasant is a dammed lake within the municipal boundaries of Peoria. Not far from Phoenix, It serves as a major recreation hub for boaters, hikers, camping and ATVer’s too. With more than 23,000 acres of water and beautiful, Lake Pleasant Regional Park is one of the most scenic recreation areas in the region. This man made lake (dam) is fed by both the Agua Fria River the Colorado river via an aqueduct. Note: This photograph looks great as a “split”, which can be viewed here on my website under “Sampled - Framed & Hung”.
I drove past this half (lol) truck one very foggy day last fall. It sat in the middle of a well maintained farmer’s field… and yet there it sat, with tiny bits of shrubbery under it…. leaving me ask myself, “and why?" I love the way the fog frames in the truck; making in known that the truck IS the subject. There aren’t any lead in lines per say, it’s just simply, a truck ....BUT it’s in its oddity that makes this photo grab ones attention, and then it’s in the rusted details that makes you look for more. I have this photograph hanging on my wall, it is one of my favorites (and the men can appreciate it too).
