Japanese Garden Lake – Seattle

06. November 2012 · Comments Off on Japanese Garden Lake – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I’ve mentioned that the Japanese Gardens in Seattle have a lot of water, well today’s image is a shot of the biggest lake in the gardens.  The water is a pretty dirty color in the picture and in truth it looks kind-a yucky when I was there.  All around the lake are paths that take you past the water and manicured trees and bushes.  You can see that this was a lovely time to go to the gardens and the fall colors are really beautiful.  I love the reds, oranges and yellows in this image.

I wanted to take this picture but there was a group of kids standing on the bridge at the far end of the lake.  They were laughing and messing about (pretending to throw each other in etc.,) and taking their own pictures.  So I just took a seat and waited.  While I was there a number of other people came by and took a picture and I heard them complaining about the kids on the bridge, but at the end of the day you just have to be patient.  The kids weren’t doing anything wrong, they were just enjoying the gardens and eventually they moved on.  That’s when I took this picture.

The challenge with pictures like this is that I wasn’t allowed to take a tripod into the gardens, so I had to raise the ISO (sensor sensitivity) so I could get a decent (fast) exposure.  Then when I got home I had to de-noise the images and that add’s image artifacts (artifacts are digital errors that appear in the image).  However as my camera is so AWESOME, the noise wasn’t too bad and the image looks great.

Master Chief and Carter were super excited tonight as their copy of Halo 4 arrived.

Snoqualmie River – Fall City

05. November 2012 · Comments Off on Snoqualmie River – Fall City · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Today’s image was taken the other day on the way home from work.  I say the way home, I did go on a little detour (about 10 miles) to Fall City.  I say City, but it’s pretty small (I don’t think it’s really a city but that’s it’s name).  In the UK we have little villages, bigger towns, and then there are massive cities.  I think to be a city in the UK you are suposed to have a cathedral.  Fall City has a mexican restaurant and a bar – but no cathedral.

Anyway I was driving over a bridge at the end of the high street and I saw the sky above river.  It looked really good.  The river was running pretty fast the water was framed by fall colors.  So I turned around and parked up.  Grabbed the camera and waled into the center of the bridge and started taking pictures.  Traffic was going past pretty fast and I think I was annoying the drivers, but you gotta do what’s necessary sometimes to take a nice pic.

Totally unrelated to today’s picture, today is November 5th, which in the UK is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night.  For my American friends, this is the annual celebration when children create a full sized effigy of a man called Guy Fawkes who lived in the early 1600’s and tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.  They then walk around their town and ask complete strangers for money saying “penny for the guy” and then spend the money of fireworks and burn the effigy on a large bonfire.  How cute is that?  This is my favorite stupid annual event.  I really miss November 5th int he UK.

Master Chief made some new friends today.  He was sitting at home waiting for Halo 4 to arrive.

Japanese Garden – Seattle

04. November 2012 · Comments Off on Japanese Garden – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I thought I’d post another shot from yesterday’s trip to the Seattle Japanese Gardens.  I have to say I’m actually pretty angry with myself as I’ve been doing this “picture a day” thing now for nearly a year and I’ve only just visited the place.  As you can see from the image below, it’s really pretty there, they have a small lake (it’s too big to call it a pond) with little streams or brooks flowing into it from the surrounding hills.

There are large rocks inside all the streams so you can jump from stone to stone to cross, this is if you can’t be bothered to walk to the nearest bridge.  Talking of bridges, there are loads of them and they are all also very cute.  You can imagine what they look like, small wooden curved bridges with handrails on each side.  The gardens are really well manicured and there are bushes and trees surrounding lake.  Some of the bushes are pruned like little banzai trees and look fantastic.

Also interspersed around the gardens are these Japanese stone lanterns – at least that’s what I think they are.  They too are really nice and add to the Japanese feel of the gardens.

At this time of year there are a load of fall colors.  Lots of reds and yellows and really deep greens.  While it wasn’t raining when I was there it was still pretty wet and that kind of made the grass and leaves look quite lush.

So, about the shot.  While I’ve been taking a lot of wide angle landscape pictures lately I’m still learning how to compose good images using ulta wide lenses (it’s not as easy as you’d think).  The most important thing to do (I think) is to get some good foreground interest in the image.  With the wide lenses you have to get very close to something so it takes a prominent position in the picture.  When I say close I mean with-in a foot.  This is what I tried to do in the image below.  The stone lantern looked really nice and I thought it would give the viewer something to start on before they view the rest of the garden.

While part of the lake is in this image it’s not really that important.  This one is really all about the stone lantern and the bushes and trees.  You can see that the sky was a little gray, but this did provide a nice soft light for pictures, it’s just a pity is wasn’t a little brighter.

This isn’t the last image I’ll post from here, and I’ll definitely be going back.  If you get the chance I really recommend checking it out.

The guys decided to make something tonight, so they got out the Lego. They made a nice little car, love the color!

Leaves – Seattle Japanese Gardens

03. November 2012 · Comments Off on Leaves – Seattle Japanese Gardens · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

For a while now I’ve been meaning to go to the Japanese Gardens in Seattle to take some pictures.  But lately it’s been totally manic at work and I’ve even had things on over the weekend so I really have had no free time.  The gardens actually close next week for the Winter so I had to go now or wait till next year.  So today I headed over to check it out.

Luckily it wasn’t raining when I got there but it was cold enough that the gardens weren’t full.  That said there were a few people there so there was some waiting around required.  Unfortunately you aren’t allowed to take tripods into the gardens and a lot of the gardens are in shade but I still got some great shots.  I’ll be posting pictures from the gardens throughout the week but I thought I’d start with something different.

There was this really big Japanese Maple and it was loosing leaves.  Below the tree there were a load of rocks covered in moss and the leaves were falling onto the moss.  The red leaves against the green moss looked fantastic and I thought it would make an interesting image.

I got down low and really close to the leaves to get the shot and I had a pretty narrow depth of field so the leaves at the back of the picture were out of focus.  I really liked the colors in this image, nice and bright.

Master Chief had a bad back tonight so he got a warmer to help ease the pain.  Not sure it worked though.

Cityscape – Seattle

02. November 2012 · Comments Off on Cityscape – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

You can’t really take a Seattle cityscape picture from across Elliott Bay without capturing the Space Needle.  I actually thought I’d posted one of these before but I checked and I hadn’t.  So while on Alki beach the other day I captured this shot.   I’m actually a huge distance from Seattle’s city center but as I have some long lenses I can capture a shot like this.

Most people think that the Space Needle is in the middle of Seattle, but in reality it’s a pretty long way from the main downtown buildings.  If you try to get everything in together you sort of have to make a choice.  You either just get the Space Needle (as below) or you shoot the downtown area (with the Great Wheel), or of course you can try for a panorama that goes from one side of the city to the other.  These look nice but they are VERY wide – actually if you go to my Guestbook page you can see what I mean.

Anyway, I was on Alki for a sunrise and took this shot.  This image was taken as the sun was starting to come up so the sky’s pretty visible and the lights are still on.  It’s really very pretty watching the sun come up over the city, if you get the chance to go to Alki, I really recommend it.

This is another example of Master Chief getting himself in a difficult situation, it’s clearly nuts!

« Older articles
Newer articles »