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Holiday Sounds with the Mountain View Jazz Red Band

On a November evening, as the holiday season kicked off, the Mountain View High School Jazz Red Band brought festive cheer to Downtown Mesa with an outdoor concert. Set against the glow of holiday lights and the city’s vibrant energy, the students showcased their talent and passion for music.

The event took place in the heart of Downtown Mesa, where the sound of smooth jazz and holiday classics filled the night air. Families and community members gathered, appreciating the warm, inviting atmosphere. The band’s dedication and skill were on display as they performed a mix of holiday favorites and jazzy arrangements, captivating the audience.

It’s not exactly winter weather here in the Phoenix area during the holiday season. But, the students’ renditions of holiday classics helped to bring the holiday spirit. Their music had the power to create the holiday mood and evoke emotions – a reminder of how deeply music connects us during this time of year.

If you’d like to have something meaningful photographed, let’s connect and we’ll be in touch!

Movement Meets the City

When Breanna asked me to shoot portraits of her dancing, the Mesa Arts Center in downtown Mesa immediately came to mind. With its urban setting, wide-open spaces, and varied textures and colors, it was the perfect backdrop for her movements and vibrant personality.

This location provides many opportunities to explore how her dance interacted with the unique textures, architecture, and lines of the space. The goal was to capture not only her graceful movements but also her creative and friendly personality, allowing it to radiate through her expression of dance.

We chose to shoot in the morning when the area was mostly shaded by surrounding buildings – ensuring soft, flattering light. The quiet time also allowed us to work without heavy foot traffic or events.

As Breanna began to move, her energy and grace brought the space to life. Walkways, staircases, and ledges became her stage, each one transformed by her ability. The photoshoot became an inspiring exploration of how art can turn any environment into something beautiful and meaningful.

This session was a reminder of the transformative power of art, and how it has the ability to breathe life and beauty into any space.

2024 Family Christmas Card

Each year our family takes Halloween photos and then use them to create our yearly Christmas card. Each year’s theme has something to do with something we’ve watched or been into that year. With the release of the Netflix live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we not only watched it, but gave the original animated series a rewatch too. This ended up being the inspiration for our Halloween costumes and this year’s Christmas card.

So here’s our family’s Christmas card this year. Here’s to a happy holiday season!

Me Made Fashion

My wife makes almost all of the clothes she wears, no exaggeration. This gives us lots of opportunities to get out and take photos of her and her clothes. It’s always so fun to get out and spend a little time together. I get to learn about the clothes she’s made, and we get to play around with posing and goof off together. It’s always a good time.

Back to Santa Barbara

When our son returned home from 2 years of service in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, all he wanted to do was head to Santa Barbara, jump on his longboard, and feel the ocean breeze on his face. It took a few months, but we got there.

While we were there, we decided to do a quick photo session as the sun was setting. We captured a few of him on his longboard, doing what he had been dreaming about for 2 years. Then we took a few more.

There’s just something about Santa Barbara. It’s a little more out of the way. It just feels authentic.

Small Town Senior Photo Session

I had the opportunity to travel to a small town in eastern Arizona recently to do a super fun senior photo session. We decided to shoot on their main street and take a quick drive out to a cotton field as the sun was setting. It was a blast to photograph this senior! The weather was fantastic, even if we did need to fight with the wind a little bit.

We also decided to get a little more creative with some double exposure portraits as well. It was a fun session!

If you’re interested in booking a senior portrait session, hit me up and we’ll plan something!

Superstition Milky Way – My Process (2 of 2)

This is part 2 of a two part series. Part 1 of this series went over shooting and initial editing of this image. If you haven’t read that post, I’d recommend going back and reading that post before going forward with this post.

This isn’t an exhaustive Photoshop how-to, as there are so many YouTube videos and blog posts out there to teach you how to do the things I’m going to go over. I’m going to touch on each of the things that I did in Photoshop in this post to make this photo turn out the way it did, and my thought processes behind it all. I feel like if you can get an overview and some thought processes, you can get an idea of how to apply them to your own photography.

Let’s Get Started

To catch us up, we shot a single exposure, and exported two separate exposures from Lightroom. One exposure was for the Milky Way and the night sky, and the other was for the foreground and the mountain. Here are our two images…

We’re going to layer them in Photoshop, and then add layer masks to show/hide different parts of each image. This will give us a composite image that has the foreground exposed properly, and the night sky properly exposed to bring out the most detail we can get from the Milky Way.

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive Photoshop tutorial, so many of the things you’ll see here are not going to be exactly as they appeared during editing, but they do give you an overview of the process…

Let’s start with masking. We want to mask the night sky OUT of the foreground photo, because we want to bring the night sky in behind the foreground. You’ll want to turn off your night sky layer and make sure you have your foreground layer selected. You also want to be sure that your foreground layer is above your night sky layer. What we do is select the foreground layer, select the layer mask icon in the layers panel, and paint out the night sky with a black brush. Once you’ve started a rough mask, you can select the marquee tool in your toolbox (or hit the M key on your keyboard) and click on “Select and Mask” on the top of your screen. Once there, you can refine your mask. You’ll end up with something that looks like this…

Now, when you turn on visibility for your night sky layer, the underexposed foreground will be covered by the foreground layer, but the night sky will show through what you masked out of the layer above it. It would look something like this…

Now we’re getting somewhere, right? It still doesn’t look quite right, but we’re getting somewhere. This is where the artistry comes in. Some things to notice now…

• The foreground doesn’t look quite right
• The night sky looks a little strange
• The path looks flat
• There are some natural highlights and lowlights in the foreground

A Note About Layer Masks

You had already created your layer mask for your foreground layer. This layer mask can be applied to other layers too. The next few edits are done specifically to the foreground layer. To achieve this, I create a new adjustment layer from the bottom of the layers palette and then select which adjustment layer I want to apply. Once the layer is created, I can hold ALT on the Keyboard on Windows, Option on Mac, and drag the layer mask I created on the foreground layer to the new adjustment layer I just created. The mask will be copied to that layer, which means that the edits that the adjustment layer makes to the image will be made selectively, based on the mask, which in this case is applied to the foreground layer.

Back to Editing

Let’s start with the foreground. It looks a little too orange’ish. I was out there at night, and the tones would have been more cool. I went with a simple solution, I added a Photo Filter layer, gave it a dark blue color, and increased the percentage to 52%. This gave the foreground a light blue hue, you can see that below…

That cooled it off, but this was late at night, and there wasn’t that much ambient light. I create a new adjustment layer for Exposure, and lower it by -.83. Now it looks a little better…

When you lower the exposure of things, you typically need to warm them back up. Rather than going back in and adjusting the previous cooling adjustment layer, I decided to create a new adjustment layer to warm it all up. I did it with another Photo Filter adjustment layer, Warming Filter applied at 15%. Here’s the result of that adjustment…

I’m feeling much better about the foreground now. It still doesn’t quite have the dynamics I’d like, but I have a trick for that. Many years ago, Chris Orwig mentioned in a session, “Soft Light is a Photographer’s best friend.” He was referring to the soft-light blend mode in Photoshop. I’ve never forgotten that, and have found that statement to be endlessly true, in so many different scenarios.

One of the best ways to add dynamics to a shot like this is to add a new Saturation adjustment layer, completely desaturate the layer so that it turns your image black/white, and then set the blend mode of that adjustment layer to Soft Light. This will immediately add dynamics and mood to your photo. At 100% opacity, it will typically be too heavy-handed, so you’ll want to back it down to something more reasonable. For this shot, 46% seemed about right. I added it to the entire shot, so I didn’t apply it to only the foreground layer. This adjustment benefited both the foreground and the sky. Here’s the result of that edit…

At this point I feel like the entire image could use a little punch, so I turn up the exposure just a little bit with a new Exposure adjustment layer…

At this point, I’d say that we’re pretty close to there. The foreground is fairly well lit and exposed and looks like night time. The Milky way is showing through well, and the image is pretty well balanced. The image is still missing something though. It’s still missing that dynamic, moody feel I’m going for.

Adding Dynamics

Here’s where artistry and your own preference come completely into play. When I look at this photo, I see a few things that I’d like to accentuate and draw attention to…

• Highlighted cholla cactus tops
• A path that I’ve hiked hundreds of times, but that looks flat
• Light and dark spots on the mountains
• Some spots in the Milky Way I’d like to bring out

A Note About Individuality

You may look at this image and notice completely different things. You may have chosen a different composition, and have different things that you notice. It’s important to realize and remember that the entire process, from start to finish, is driven by your approach and your creativity.

There are some technical processes and practices that need to be done correctly. You have to focus on those. Those are your price for entry. You have to know these things. You have to practice them. Once you have those things well in hand, you can go to work on your own craft. That’s when you deviate, that’s when you personalize, and you begin to add your own individuality.

Sometimes it’s frustrating to get stuck in “doing” and not “creating” the way you’d like. Stick with the doing though. Make notes, hold to your vision. You’ll get to a point where you’ll start to deviate and innovate and put your own stamp on your work, and your work will be your own.

Back to Adding Dynamics

The Dodge tool in Photoshop will allow you to selectively lighten an image, like running a brush over your image. Inversely, the Burn tool will allow you to selectively darken an image in the same way. Dodging and burning are old darkroom techniques where the person creating the exposures would selectively darken and lighten images. We’re going to use these techniques to add dynamics to each of the layers.

Dodging and Burning are not non-destructive though. This means that once you’ve done this to a layer, you can’t adjust it. So before you dodge and burn, you want to create a copy of the layer you’re going to work on.

Focusing on only the foreground at the moment, I mentioned that I wanted to bring out the highlights on the chollas, wear a path that I’d walked a hundred times before, bring out the highlights and add to the shadows on the mountain, and add some overall dynamics. Through dodging and burning, I achieve the following results…

I want to add some dynamics and bring some of the milky way out now too. So I made a copy of the layer that holds the sky, and went to dodging and burning here too. Part of the challenge with dodging and burning is that it’s easy to get heavy-handed with it. The great thing is that we’re on a copy of the layer. This means that we can adjust the opacity of the layer that we’re working on.

If the editing starts to feel a little heavy-handed, you can adjust the layer opacity to help bring it back down a little bit. That’s exactly what I did on my sky layer. The dodging got a little heavy, so I backed the layer opacity of the new layer copy back down to about 85%, and it did what I wanted it to. Here’s that result…

You can see that I added a little more atmosphere to the Milky Way, helping it to stand out against the night sky, and helping it to compete with the newly lit objects in the photo.

Wrap Up

That’s it! That’s how I got to my final result for this image. This final image matched the vision I had in my mind for the image I wanted to take. While the image itself is great to have, the experience of being out there under the night sky, with a good friend, taking the photos and having discussions was a big part of all of this. The photo is just a representation of how I experienced that night of photographing the Milky Way over the Superstition Mountains. What you can’t see is my friend Mat next to me while we discussed the types of things that you almost can’t help to discuss under a night sky, staring at the Milky Way. It’s important to remember and understand that, that memory, that mood, all goes into the final product. The final photo reflects the experience.

Your final photo(s) should reflect your experience. Don’t forget that the work of a photographer is to be a witness, and then communicate that through your photography.

Good luck in your photography adventures!

Superstition Milky Way – My Process (1 of 2)

This is the first of two posts that explain my process for creating this image. This first post focuses on taking the photo and using Lightroom. The second post focuses on Photoshop and touches on individuality.

I wanted to share a little bit about my process for how I took and edited this Milky Way photo at the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. First, I feel like a little background as to why I even care to share my process to begin with is important…

We all see photos that we like. If you’re a photographer, you may decide that you want to get out and take a similar photo for yourself. You may want to challenge yourself, or you may want to see if you can replicate it. I think it’s super important to recognize that as photographers, we’re all constantly learning. We learn different techniques and get ideas to create new ones. We end up having a collection of techniques and ideas that we can put to use in different scenarios.

Not every technique, not every setting, not every idea, will work for every scenario. It’s why presets are great, but they can only take you so far. Presets typically work for a particular shot, or a range of particular scenarios, but they don’t work for every single shot. Hopefully, what I’m going to explain for this photograph will help to set you on your way to creating your own shots, with your own vision.

Quick Note About This Post

This post is by no means an exhaustive “how to” tutorial. It’s intended to give you a broad overview and give you some ideas for how you can approach your shooting and editing for yourself. I wanted to share my processes in case it helps any other photographers. I share a few ah-ha moments I’ve learned along the way, so that hopefully somebody that comes across this later can learn from the years I’ve spent learning this on my own, and can get to innovating that much more quickly!

That said, this post is intended to help you understand how an idea for a photo becomes a reality, and how a raw images becomes a final product. You can see the before and after below…

Location

First, I went out on this particular night with a good friend, Mat. We planned for a clear night that we knew we would see the Milky Way over the mountain, with no moon in the night sky to compete with the light of the stars. There are plenty of trails that lead to the Superstitions. Mat had recently been out in this area, and decided that we should meet up in this particular area for a few reasons. First, it gave us a nice foreground for the shot. Second, it was easily accessible, and we didn’t need to hike very far to take the photo.

Once we arrived, we spent about 20 minutes setting up and finding the best spot to photograph from. I tried different foregrounds, but ended up settling on a trail leading to the mountain to kind of match the Milky Way in the sky. I framed the cholla cactus to fall to the sides of the trail. The location was set, so now I needed to dial in my camera settings.

Camera Settings

Admittedly, my lens for this type of photography isn’t the most expensive, and that’s okay. I’m able to achieve results like this, so I’m pretty happy with it. I use a Rokinon F-2.8/14mm. You typically want to shoot night sky and milky way photos with a lens with a wider field of view. I shoot with a 14mm lens. It’s an older lens. I shoot with a Canon R6. This particular lens doesn’t communicate with the camera very well due to its age. I discuss the needed settings on your newer cameras to work with older lenses in a previous post.

You’re going to need to recover A LOT of detail in editing, so make sure that you’re shooting in RAW. RAW will capture more information – it is an uncompressed version of the image your camera is capturing. JPEG is a compressed image format, and will give you less information to edit later. Make sure you’re shooting RAW for this.

When you focus for this type of shot, you need to focus your lens at infinity, but then back it off just a little bit. To check that you’ve done this well, you can point your camera to a light that is far away, or to a bright star or planet, and then electronically zoom in on that subject and adjust your focus until that subject is as sharp as you can get it. Typically, that’s going to be to full infinity focus, then backed off just a hair…

Once you’ve set your focus, you can compose your shot. Take into account your leading lines, subject, and balance. You can also use the Rule of Thirds, watching your horizon line. I won’t go deep into composition in this post. I will say this though – make sure you have a vision for your shot before you settle on a composition. Take some time to understand the shot, and what your final output will look like. Taking this time to have a vision for your final photograph and compose your shot will make all the difference.

Each camera will be a little different. For my particular camera, I shot this at ISO 12800. Because the earth is constantly moving, you typically don’t want to shoot a milky way photo for any longer than 10-15 seconds because the stars will appear blurry in the sky (since they’re always moving!) I shot this for 15 seconds. I could have bumped it down to 10 seconds and increased my ISO, but I was trying to decrease noise in my photo.

Higher ISO values will let more light into your photo, but will also increase the amount of noise in your photo. This isn’t always such a problem with the night sky because its full of stars, but when your foreground is noisy too, it can be a bummer. Many photographers will actually shoot 2 separate photos, one for the foreground with low noise, and one for the sky, exposed for the milky way, and then composite them. I didn’t do that for this shot, I kept it to a single exposure.

Once you’ve set your focus, settled on a composition, and set your camera settings, it’s time to start shooting. It’s best to shoot with a remote shutter, if possible. My camera will communicate with my phone via Wi-Fi, so I do that. Keep in mind that if you do that, it will use battery more quickly. If a remote shutter isn’t available, typically you’ll be able to set a 2-second timer. You’ll press the shutter button and then back away from the camera. You do this to avoid any camera shake at all.

Shoot, recompose, refocus, and repeat!

Editing

You’re home, and ready to edit. Here’s the shot as it appears, straight out of the camera without any editing. I use Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Topaz tools to edit my photos.

Frist thing, I cropped the image. The cholla that sticks out on the right is distracting, and rather than try to remove it later, I decided I would crop the entire image down some to focus more on the mountain and crop out some of the messy edge shapes.

It’s pretty bland, pretty flat, and a little scary to see once you load up your image in Lightroom. Your work is going to be cut out for you! Luckily, you shot RAW, so you’ll be able to work with this. Looking at this, there are a few things you’re going to want to accomplish…

• Darken the sky
• Brighten the Milky Way
• Light the foreground
• Add depth
• Make the photo look how you remember it looking

Lightroom has some simple tools for achieving your goals. The settings below aren’t the exact settings that I used for this photo, but they give you a good idea of what you’ll need to do to accomplish what you need to do. Be sure to read through it though, because there’s a plot twist…

I typically start at the top of this list. First, I adjusted the color balance. It obviously wasn’t this dusty and brown looking. I set that first to be closer to what I remember. I dropped the exposure just a hair to darken the entire image. I pushed the contrast up quite a bit. This increases the contrast between dark and light objects. This helps the stars to stand out against the dark sky. The highlights will increase the brightness of the stars, but also the glow of the city lights in the distance, so you have to be careful with that. You don’t want that competing with your stars. Pulling the shadows up helps brighten some of the darker areas. For this particular shot, it mostly affected the foreground, so that’s why they’re pulled up. Again, increasing the whites increased the city lights in the distance, so I had to be careful with that. Pulling the blacks up helps the foreground to look closer to what I remember it looking like.

I finish with setting the texture, clarity, vibrance, and saturation for the image. It’s super tempting to bump the clarity because it’ll make your image appear so sharp. What clarity does is increase the contrast between light and dark objects by increasing the contrast at the borders. When you bump the clarity up high, you end up with a very unnatural looking image. It’s always obvious when somebody is heavy-handed with clarity. That’s not a judgement, but it does tend to make things look kind of like a felt poster. It’s worth going easy on the clarity for your final image quality.

Sharpening settings – Sharpen the image until it’s too much, then back it off a little bit. Add some masking to further refine your sharpening so that it affects the bigger edges. While you do this, hold the “Alt” key on Windows, “Option” key on Mac, and you’ll see the mask.

Noise Reduction – You shot this at a high ISO, so you’ll have some noise to remove. I use Topaz DeNoise between Lightroom and Photoshop, so your settings may be a little different. Don’t worry about removing all the noise though. Noise in your photo is natural, and trying to remove too much will make it look like a painting.

Lens Profile Correction (not shown) – Lightroom will adjust your photo for you based on the lens you use. Just select your lens type, and Lightroom will automatically adjust the image to account for the distortion from the lens. While you’re in this area, remove the color aberration as well.

Plot Twist – Two Exposures

So now, I have a foreground and mountain that look like I remember, but the sky still isn’t right. I mean, I didn’t really see the milky way the way the final image is going to show it as, so It’s obvious that I’m going to need to work with 2 separate exposures – one for the night sky and one for the foreground, to make this turn out the way I’d like.

Go ahead and export your photo once you have your foreground exposed the way you like.

Now it’s time to go back and start editing for the Milky Way. There are so many blog posts on how to edit for the Milky Way. It’s all based on the image you took, so exact settings really won’t apply.

These settings apply more to the sky. I dropped my exposure a little more. I bumped the contrast a little bit more. I dropped the highlights quite a bit because the city lights in the distance were causing problems. I brought down the shadows a little bit. I took up the whites, which brought up the city lights some, but also brought out the milky way. I also almost completely got rid of the black values.

I bumped the texture and clarity a little bit, pretty much left dehaze where it was, and increased the vibrance and saturation of the sky.

Again, you can go in and make other edits that you see as necessary. You can think of these edits as global edits. These edits are applicable to the entire image, but we’re going to ignore what these edits are doing to everything but the sky. Once you’ve completed these edits, go ahead and re-export this image with a different filename.

Now you have 2 images, exactly the same composition, but completely different exposures. You were able to achieve this fairly easily because you shot in RAW, remember? These two images allow you to expose for the foreground and the mountain, and the night sky separately. Your next step will be to make a composite in Photoshop.

Noise Reduction

I actually prefer Topaz DeNoise to Lightroom’s denoise function. I feel like Topaz DeNoise does a little bit better job with noise reduction in photos like these, given that it’s an application that is committed to only reducing noise in photographs. I use Lightroom’s noise reduction in my portrait photography, but when I shoot landscape and night photography, I’ve found Topaz DeNoise works better for me for those purposes. This isn’t a paid promotion or anything, just a note on my processes. It has some additional settings and parameters that help to give a little more fine control to reducing noise in photographs. If you don’t plan on using Topaz DeNoise, feel free to experiment further with noise reduction in Lightroom.

Wrap Up

That’s it for this post. We’ve covered a lot of ground here. There’s enough settings and processes to experiment with here. The main ideas were…

• Choose a clear, dark sky
• Have a vision for your photo
• Compose your shot
• Focus to infinity
• Shoot in RAW
• Edit for foreground
• Edit for night sky
• Export two separate images for a composite in Photoshop
• Light noise reduction in Topaz DeNoise, or noise reduction in Lightroom before you export your images

Photoshop is where we’ll put everything together and give the photo it’s final look. You can find the 2nd post in this series here.

That Santa Barbara Backlight

We recently traveled to Santa Barbara, California. Being from Arizona, you know we had to take advantage of that sunset backlight and shoot some portraits on the beach, I absolutely cannot resist a good backlight! We had been exploring the beach for a little while, and decided that this was a good spot to take advantage of the light.

Let me know if you’d like to schedule your next portrait session!

Removing Clutter to Allow Focus

This post is about removing clutter to allow better focus on the subject of a photograph. There’s definitely a deeper lesson here, but that’s not what this post is about (there’s a great post on this over here if you’re interested.) We don’t always get to shoot in the most ideal conditions. Even when we get to shoot in ideal conditions, there are some simple steps that we can take to help the eye focus on the intended subject of the photo. Some of these steps are in camera, and some of them are in post.

In camera, you want to try to block objects that may cause the eye to wander from the subject of the photograph. Look for things like leading lines, rocks, cars, bins, branches, trees, dark shadows, etc. You want to try to frame your shot the best you can. That’s not to say that there isn’t some visual interest that can’t be added, and you may not want to get too sterile, but try to find an angle that will allow for the right light and will let the main thing be the main thing.

In editing, you can look for those elements that cause clutter, and clean them up. It may take a little time to get used to finding them, but with time, you’ll get used to finding them. You’ll want to clean them up, but not make the photo too sterile or unrealistic. Here’s an example below…

This isn’t a tutorial on how to use the tools to do the work, there’s plenty of those out there on YouTube. Instead, this is meant to help you see things a little differently. You can see in the example above that I was looking to remove clutter that would distract from the main subject of the photo. I removed several items from the photo to help the subject become the main focus. Notice how in the before photo, your eye wanders when the photo is cluttered, and how once the photo is cleaned up, it’s easier to focus on the subject of the photo. It’s just as, if not more important, to see what you need to do, as it is to be able to do it.

I used Photoshop, copied the background layer, and went to work with the Stamp and Content Aware Fill tools. I removed the lamp post because it drew the eye off to the right. I removed the stop sign for the same reason. The bush on the right had some light that poked through the bottom of it that drew my eye to it, so I removed it as well. Palm trees in the distance infamously turn into floating blobs when you shoot shallow (I shot this at 85mm F/1.4), so I like to remove them, since they can be distracting. There’s a blue recycling bin in the background that I removed as well, I cleaned a light spot off a wall in the background, removed some rocks and some grass clumps and a little bit of flyaway hair. There are, of course, other elements that could have been cleaned. the red flag on the mailbox for instance, some more of the branches on the bottom of the bush, etc. There’s a balance between cleaning everything and being too sterile, and not not cleaning enough. It’s important to find that balance.

When you look at the before and after of this photo, you can see how removing clutter can help bring subjects into focus. Even in less-than-ideal photography conditions, a little clutter cleanup can go a long ways towards making a photo work.