Raymond Abril

Glowing clouds.

Sedona

Bokeh is fascinating.

A Cactus Flower from a walk around South Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona

Sometimes, you’ve just got to enjoy what you are doing.

Taken on a recent trip to Huntington Beach, CA. The thunderstorm was moving on while the sun set over the ocean. It was really cold, compared to what I’m used to, so it took a lot of will power to take this without being blurry.. even at ISO 1600. I wasn’t able to take pictures of surfers at the beach this time due to the tsunami warning and high waves that reached quite high on the pier. When I was packing to leave the next morning, I noticed that there were no surfers in the water and they were all lined up… maybe waiting to get in.

There is an ‘experimental walnut orchard’ next to my neighborhood, and the clouds were really pleasant today with the light rain. I couldn’t get it all in one exposure, so I tone mapped these three.

Been working on this panorama in my spare time. It is stitched together from 129 images from my roof.

I’m enjoying making fractals now, and I’m looking to find other ways to be creative.

From my 3rd story studio, I can see every mountain in the valley. I have experienced the sunrises and sunsets of the different seasons and began to understand early man’s fascination with understanding the relationship of where the sun rises and sets and the seasons.

The entire reason I decided to buy my house was because of the 3rd floor loft. To me, it is a romantic sensation to sit at my desk and look behind my monitor to see the whole city, or to DJ with only the light from the street lamps illuminating my mixer. I would not be able to choose if I prefer to watch the sun wake up from behind South Mountain or fall asleep behind the Estrella Mountains.

When I first moved in, I chose to tell time by where the sun was in the sky. This experiment was interesting to impress upon the minimal amount of illumination upon my perception of days versus nights. It was a glorious portion of my life where I was free to read, write, create, and understand the physical world. Within the city of Phoenix, people are so used to staying indoors with everything closed to keep out the incredible temperatures. 110 degrees Fahrenheit at midnight? From my studio, I can see the Earth around me and it impresses upon me inspiration that has no comparison to anything else. I am surrounded by activity. Planes land and take off at all hours, sometimes as dots of light and others as curious objects in the distance moving at an angle.

What this view represents is a promise I made to myself to stay with my hometown and be a part of it as it grows. Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the country, and yet it is so very new. Newcomers often quip about the lack of culture, yet they don’t provide any of their own. I see Phoenix as a hot center for the future. One of my dreams is to open my own art gallery.

I decided to stay in Phoenix and purchase a house instead of traveling the world. The personal growth I have accomplished within my home have allowed me to develop a concise understanding of myself. The more of which is the plan I have laid out to someday realize the rest of my dreams. Besides, there will be time to travel the world later; and I will have my home to come back to!

I combined 3 12-bit RAW pictures from my camera on a tripod and merged them to 32-bit per channel. Click the picture to view the full version. I have much to learn about the process, but I just wanted the detail in the clouds to stand out. I’m experimenting with the process, and I’ll keep working on it. My Brightkite will have other pictures from the city.

In the meantime, I am going to appreciate the lights of the city at night. :)

Perhaps my fascination with flowers come from their rarity in the desert. When the rains come, they bloom en mass. If you wait too long, however, they are soon gone. Their beauty used to expand their empires and populate the world. I grabbed this picture on my way to get something to eat this morning. Actually, I was experimenting with the aperture override on my camera. Someday I’ll get a proper lens for taking macro shots.

I will be posting even so many more at my PixelBlog! I have so many sites and blogs to update and it does get tiresome, however soon I will have everything centralized. You’ll see :] A basic feed of everything I do can be found at my FriendFeed. With some time, I’ll have my page setup that shows everything I’m trying to accomplish and have finished… I’m excited!

As a child, I was always asking questions about the natural world around me. My back-yard was South Mountain, and I was free to roam and explore. My curiosity was not limited to natural phenomena, for I always wanted to know how things worked. How did the alarm clock work? I wanted to take it apart, however considering I was only 5 years old I did not want to be unable to put it back together.

My parents bought me several books filled with questions and answers, yet as encyclopedic as these were they only fueled my thirst for knowledge. If only there was Wikipedia in the 80’s…

The ice crystals in the upper atmosphere were always more interesting to me than “the man in the moon.” I’ve never seen the man, for even with a hyperactive imagination I had to strain to guess that the upper two darker mares were the eyes and the lower its mouth. I read a story about an artist showing his capabilities by drawing a perfect circle, and so circles have been fascinating to me.

I took this picture with the camera laying on the fence pointing upwards with a 30 second exposure. Even within 30 seconds, at full resolution the stars are a line from the rotation of the Earth.