Non-Arizonans will often ask “how do you cope with the heat?!” Sure, its hot down here, but we have tricks. Air conditioning helps, but it can only go so far. This is a peek at part of my heat management kit…

Strobist info: 285 HV on shelf above beer pointing straight down on them at 1/16th power. 580 EX II behind the salsa and aimed at the wall behind the beer, with purpleish gel at 1/16th power. Skyport triggers.

As I post this, I’m realizing that I enjoy photographing my beer almost as much as I enjoy drinking it. I have a lot of shots of beer cans, mugs, glasses, chalaices and goblets.. This from the archives, one of my favorite shots of beer for breakfast walking around Antwerp, Belgium -

Stay thirsty my friends.

Check out my new awesomely animated banner images. I did this using jQuery and some help and inspiration from Nick Pannuto over at sneakyness.com. It was actually pretty easy looking back, and I like the effect. If you hover your mouse over the banner, it will stay on that image, and if you click it, it will cycle through the images! Pretty sweet!! And not based in Flash. I also fixed the stupid layout of my search bar.

The bad news is that I found Microsoft Internet Explorer is not displaying my page right at all! If you are using internet explorer, you will see a warning message kindly asking you to get a modern browser such as firefox,  google chrome, opera, etc. These are FREE folks — they are faster, safer, and much more user friendly than IE. Not to mention they understand CSS code correctly. I have already spent hours trying to get my site IE friendly, and will no doubt spend more…. But in the mean time do me, the internet at large, and yourself a favor and get a better browser! Think of what you may be missing!

Heck, I even got my 66 year old mother using firefox — its that good!!!

For those curious, I will save you the pain of opening IE. And for those curious what firefox will do, here are screen shots showing the IE massacre:

If there are any CSS gurus reading, I’d love some help… My problem is <ul><li> lists with CSS list-style:none; attributes (I think). I am a total hack at this stuff, so any input would be much appreciated. Drop a comment below or shoot me an email.

Tonight I had a bug to pic up my camera and practice some strobist photography. I wanted to try hand holding my flash just to get a feel for it since this is a pretty common technique and I better at least try if before I need it. So, strobe in one hand, camera in the other, and a couple of curious cats who are so photogenic it’s almost sick.

This last one is a pretty good example of how to take bad strobist pictures, but I still find it rather amusing…

As much as I enjoy landscape photography, I am really getting into doing portraits. I’ve acquired some of the necessary tools (namely lighting equipment) to do it right and I’m actually really enjoying it. These are some recent shots I did for a coworker for her daughter’s 8th grade graduation.

If you are interested in a portrait session, please contact me! I will be posting some more of my portraiture soon.

I’m a little behind on my postings, but here are some cool shots from a couple weekends ago spent the weekend up on the Mogollon Rim. Our 1st night we camped right on the rim and found there was a pair of nesting red tailed hawks in the cliffs directly below us. I sat and watched them for hours. I couldn’t see the chicks, but could hear them below me whenever mom or dad came in with some food.

I caught this shot (made famous on Just JoeP’s blog) of one with a snake in its beak just before it dove into the nest to feed the youngsters.

I guess since this was a trip for Mother’s day I should show some of the group shots of us: