Tony Seeley Photography

It’s funny how when you live really close to a place how frequently you visit. I guess you keep telling yourself “I’ll go another day!” I lived 30 miles from London in the UK for many years and I never went into the city!

Well Seattle is kinda the same. We live no distance at all (it takes about 20 minutes to drive in) and we hardly ever go.

However recently we had some family visitors and we planned a day in the city. The weather was going to be beautiful so I grabbed my camera and off we went.

I had recently brought a new 18-135 lens for our upcoming Orlando vacation and decided to take the lens and check it out. Now it’s not that fast (f/3.5 when shooting at 18mm and drops down to f/5.6 as you zoom in) but the image quality seemed pretty good and as an all weather lens, it seemed a great choice for a family vacation.

As I’m a sucker for ultra wide lenses, I also took along my 14mm f/2.8 so I had some nice wide glass if I needed it.

I won’t bore you with all the family pictures (you will get enough of those when I go to Florida) so I just picked some nice pictures of the city.

I have to say I was REALLY pleased with the new lens. Sure yes it’s not as sharp as some of the primes I have, but being able to just point and shoot without having to keep changing lenses was great.

Lisa is not the most “patient” wife when I’m out with a lot of gear, so I’m adapting and trying to have to photographer persona’s.

There’s the version of me that takes loads of gear and spends lots of time taking the same image from different points of view with different glass, and there’s the husband who grabs the shot with one lens and moves on.

It was a lovely day and I got some nice shots of the city.

Looking forward to really putting the new lens through its paces when we go on our vacation.

Very interesting day yesterday. Abi had a Gym Meet in Bellevue so we all went to that (I say all, I obviously mean Abi, Lisa and I – James stayed at home on his computer). Anyway Abi walked on at 4:30 in the afternoon and the competition finished at 8:30pm.

She did amazingly well and came first in Beam, Bar and Vault and second in Floor, and first overall with a total score of 37.1 a whole point above her nearest competitor. I suspect she was slightly disadvantaged on floor as she was the first person to compete, so the judges base other scores off her! Bottom line it’s always really better to go somewhere in the middle of the pack – that said she was amazing. (Very proud Dad)

What made the day especially interesting was the weather. I should call out that when I left home to go to the meet (around 4pm) it was dry outside. The day had been cold but clear, even with some lovely blue skies. Anyway while at the meet it started to snow.

When we left the gym the snow was sticking and the roads were just terrible. People where sliding all over the place, hitting curbs and cars and it was pretty dangerous.

Lisa and I were in different cars and I got out of their first and headed home. I got on the 520 freeway and the traffic came to a halt around 2 miles from the end of the road. We just weren’t moving at all so in frustration I followed some other cars who exited the freeway by traveling the wrong way off the 520 by driving up the on ramp.

I then cut through back streets (witnessing multiple accidents) and got to the bottom of Novelty hill (we live up a big hill separating Redmond from Duvall.)

Needless to say I was keeping Lisa up to date on my progress over the phone, telling her the state of the roads, so she got to the bottom of Novelty around the same time as me. We tried to get up the hill but it just wasn’t happening, cars that were further up the hill from us had given up, turned round and came down. People told us the road was un-passable and there were too many abandoned cars from failed attempts.

Eventually (after not going anywhere for a while) we gave up too and turned round and tried another hill to get home. This also proved to be impossible and once again we had to turn around and head back to Redmond.

By now it was 10pm and we were hungry and tired. Lisa called the Redmond Marriott and got us a room and we headed there for the night. When she called they were at 40% capacity, when we got there they were nearly full. I called James and told him what was going on and he was fine, said he’d see us in the morning.

At 9am I got Lisa and Abi up, we grabbed some breakfast and headed home (again). We made it up Novelty Hill this time but had to pass around 60 abandoned cars that had been left on the hill. In some places the road was down to a single lane there were just so many cars!

Eventually I made it home and pulled up outside our house that was covered in snow and looked great, so I grabbed a picture of that!

I walked in the house and found James still on his computer in the same clothes.  Apparently with neither Lisa or I there he decided to stay up all night and play games – oh to be 16 again 🙁

So today I’m posting two pictures. Abi on the 1st position podium and our house in the snow.

Like I said, an interesting day. 🙂

Those that check out my pictures know that I like HDR images.  I know that this isn’t to everyone’s taste but I just love the way they look.  Anyway much to my frustration Lisa doesn’t like HDR photography at all and tells me the images look fake.

I definitely agree that HDR doesn’t work in all situations and you can easily overdo the processing (something I’m guilty of too sometimes).  When I got home I shot the house and bracketed 6 exposures – all one stop apart.

I then threw them all into Photomatix to see what it would produce.  The result was just horrible.  Sure the image had better dynamic range but just looked terrible.

When processing HDR the tone mapping tool (I like Photomatix) is just the beginning, you then need to stack the original images with the tone mapped version in layers in photoshop.  Then the work begins.  You manually blend layers together to produce the desired end result.

Then you denoise the image, add any filter effects (Topaz, NIK or OnOne provide great tools for this) and finally sharpen.

The image above took a while as snow and HDR don’t like each other 🙂  This image was a combination of the six original pictures, the Photomatix tone mapped image, an HDR Topaz Adjust image and several NIK color effects filters.

I tried to keep the end result as subtle as possible – hopefully Lisa will like this one.

This picture however, I know she will like 🙂  Abi once again in fist place – like I said above, very proud Dad.

A few months ago I attended a photography course at Bellevue College called “Shoot to Show”. The purpose of the course was to learn how to shoot pictures that people would want to buy, frame and hang them in a public showing and try and sell some work.

We had a window of a few months to go and take pictures that followed a theme. The class could pick its own theme and the one we selected was “The Beginning or End of Day”.  We spent ages picking the theme and even when we selected this one not everyone was happy.  In the end the images taken were supposed to make you think of the beginning or end of the day but having said that I’m not sure all the images were successful, but I don’t think it was really that important – we had fun.

Once we all took a load of pictures, we had to submit them to a jury to select their favorites. Our jury had four members, one of which was the dean of the college and they stack ranked your pictures in their favorite order.  We were only allowed to frame and hang 3 pictures and they had to be the top three pics from the jury.

I submitted nine pictures in total and the jury’s top pick was my favorite too, but the other two were a surprise.

• My first picture was taken on the west side of Lake Washington looking at a pier and in the distance Bellevue.  I had a neutral density filter on the camera so I had a long exposure and the water looked smooth like glass.
• The second image was taken of Snoqualmie Falls.  When I took this picture I got completely soaked.
• The last image was taken in Bellevue Downtown Park of a tree as the sun was setting.

I liked all three but they weren’t the ones I would have picked.  That said I framed all three for the show.  I went to Aaron Brothers in Redmond and brought some frames (they had a great deal on where if you brought one frame you got one for 1c).  I printed the images out myself and purchased some pre-cut mats (to keep the framing costs down) and framed the images myself.

Part of the course was instruction on how to frame your images.  Details on popular frame types and colors, how to select mats and how to finish the frame with backing and wire.  All stuff I really didn’t know.

Well today was the day that I got to hang the images.  I drove over to Renton and joined the other students on the course and we all learnt how best to hang your images for best effect.  (Trust me it’s more than just throwing them on the wall).  Ray (our instructor) asked us to provide details on the images and prices, along with a bio and head shot.  He printed out all the information and backed it on foam board.  Having hanged the pictures we added the details for each image and our bio and picture.

The showing opens officially on Tuesday night and I’m looking forward to see what happens. The whole course was very good, I learnt a load, and made some new friends and if I’m lucky, I make a few dollars too (not that that really matters of course).  The real reason I did this is that we have a load of coffee houses in the area and many of them let you show your work and sell it out of the shop.  So haven’t gained some experience I may try doing this on my own.

Again this isn’t really a big money making opportunity, but if it pays for some camera gear every now and then, that’s great.

After Tuesday I’ll let you know how it goes, but for now here are my three images hanging on the wall.

Here’s the three pictures.

Over the last couple of weeks something interesting has started to happen.  People have started coming to me with requests and ideas for pictures.  Some are ideas for serious pictures and some people suggest scenarios for the Halo guys.  This really couldn’t come at a better time – as I’m running out of ideas 🙂

I created a blog page to provide a location for you to suggest “Stuff” and give you guidance on what would be helpful.  You can go to the page here: http://blog.tonyseeley.com/?page_id=676

If you don’t know what to suggest today but come up with an idea in a weeks time, you can find this link under the Pages section on the right hand side of the blog.

So don’t be shy, make a suggestion, you never know, it may end up on the blog (and you’ll get all the credit).

To make the resolution fun, I have decided to post two images a day – yeah I know I’m mad!

The first is a serious attempt at photograph, portraits, landscapes, you know, the usual “stuff”.

The second is a fun image, something people shouldn’t take too seriously.

So what’s the fun image about?

Well for Christmas, Santa brought me three Halo soldier action figures, ok I got them myself but in my defense there was a motive (it’s not like I like playing with toy soldiers or anything!)

The idea is I put these Halo dudes in “funny” situations and take a shot.

Now as I write this I’m actually cringing, as it sound’s really lame, but I have some ideas so let’s see how this pans out.

So to summarize, expect two pictures a day, a serious one, and a fun one.