First off is we have made an offer on a property in Washington State. The problem is that there are multiple offers which has taken a lot of my attention recently.

Probably the biggest reason though is that my primary PC died a horrible death last week. I haven’t had access to Lightroom or Photoshop for over a week now. All of my data is safe, I have a very robust backup scheme and a new computer is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. The upside to this is that it has prompted me to finally make the jump to Mac.

Stay tuned and I hope to be up to speed very soon.

As many of you may know, we are moving to Olympia, WA this spring.  We are also in the process of trying to find a place to live in Olympia.  This past weekend I took a couple days off of work and flew into Seattle for a marathon house hunting weekend.  This image was shot during the flight up on Friday morning.

This is of Mt. Rainier, from the east looking towards the sound.  Needless to say, I am really looking forward to having this in my back yard.

During our recent downtown Phoenix photowalk we came across a building that has these amazing curved windows.  My friend Chris Frailey included a shot of the building in his recent blog post about the walk, you can see that post here. The building really does seem “out of time” but what really caught my attention was the reflection of the building in the glass windows of the building across the street, as well as the effect that the alternating colors of glass had on the overall scene.  I decided to turn around and shoot if from that perspective which also goes hand in hand with my goal of shooting more abstracts in 2012.  I hope you enjoy the results.

I have to confess though, I took inspiration from my buddy Mike Olbinski when it came to a title for this post, he has a great series of movie title images, and I thought that Inception would work well for this slightly distorted perspective.

During our recent photo walk in downtown Phoenix we ended up at Chase Field.  I have shot here many times before but I think this is the first time I have seen this area without any people.  I had to stop and grab a shot.

You may have noticed that I have not been nearly as active on the blog or in the social media realm.  We are completely wrapped up in long distance house hunting, and that has really cut into the time that I would spend online for non-house hunting things.

Ok, maybe not the most original title for a post, but it certainly is accurate, and the truth is that I really don’t know the first thing about flowers.  This one caught my eye though as yellow is one of my favorite colors and the afternoon light was falling on it in a way that I really liked.

This shot was handheld during our recent downtown Phoenix photowalk, and I guess I could have gotten more detail if I had been on a tripod and used a macro lens, but I like it anyway.

On of the truly great things about social media is that you can connect and become friends with people who share similar interests, regardless of where you physically live.  What is even better is when you actually get a chance to meet those new friends.  It was great having Chris Nitz in town for a couple days, and having the opportunity to get out and shoot with him.

This image, captured with my IR converted D200 is capturing Chris doing what he does best, making an image of one of his Lego friends.  Look closely, it is there. :-)

You will notice that there is some toning in the trees, I had initially removed all color from the image, but it really took the surreal feel out of the shot, so I put it back in, I hope it works for you as well as it does for me.

One thing that I love about IR converted cameras is their ability to pull texture and fine detail out of scenes.  To the naked eye, this brick wall seemed pretty plain, but when shot in IR, there is all this great detail in both the bricks and the wood frames of the windows.

This image was made at Heritage Square in downtown Phoenix during a little photowalk with Chris Frailey, Bryan Snider, John Stolarski, and Chris Nitz who was in town from Wisconsin.  Everyone had a lot of fun, and I even managed to get stuck in an elevator. :-)

One thing that became clear is that we needed to make some drastic changes, and for those that follow me know, those drastic changes have been set in motion.  These changes though have come at a photographic cost, at most I will get about 1 week a year to shoot the Arizona monsoon, and my Arizona storm chasing career is all but over.

You might think that this would be a terrible thing, and while I do have a passion for shooting the Arizona monsoon, I will have a whole new set of subject matter, including weather patterns, that simply are not possible in the Arizona desert.

This leads to some goals I have for 2012.

First off is doing a book I have been thinking about for a little over a year now.  I have no idea if people want what I have to offer when it comes to a book, but it is something that I feel I need to do.  Second is a personal photo project that is impossible in Arizona, but something I have wanted to do since 2008.  I am not going to give out any details on that project yet, but as it develops, hopefully in the summer of 2012, I will be sharing it, and hopefully turning it into a book as well.

I hope you will stay tuned to this blog in 2012 as I have some goals for it as well.  I really want to expand my posts to include more tutorial content.  I have always questioned if I had anything to teach new photographers, but given the feedback I get on Facebook and Twitter, it seems that I do.  I will also continue to share my photography as I always have.

Thank you again for reading and following my blog, and I hope that 2012 is a great year for all of us.

Please click on any image to see a larger version or to order prints

I hope you have enjoyed these images.  This list is far from complete, but represent the images that came to mind as I was drinking my morning coffee on Christmas Eve.  They are also in not particular order.

I want to thank each and ever one of you that visit my blog and support my work, it means the world to me.  I am really looking forward to sharing my photography with you in 2012, I have some exciting ideas, please stay tuned!

I got out of work a little early today for the Christmas weekend, and happened to have my IR converted D200 with me on the drive hope.  Granted, this particular road is not on my way home, but I was looking for a little foliage to capture, so I took a little detour.