Cars – Seattle Art Museum

22. September 2012 · Comments Off on Cars – Seattle Art Museum · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Today was a really good day, I’m totally exhausted now of course but wait till you hear what I did.

This morning I got up at 8am (it was raining, so I guess summer is now over) and I headed out to pick up Chris Pearson (my photo buddy).  We hit the road and headed to Seattle (still raining – and the 520 bridge was closed for the weekend so we had to go the long way across the I90).

We arrived in Seattle at 9am and went to Pike Place Market to go on a Photography Walking Tour.  The tour lasted around 3 hours and we had a blast.  I’ve lived here 10 years but still learnt some new stuff about the city.  Our guide took us through the Market, past the “Gum Wall” (more on that in another posting), down Post Alley to the Art Museum, then down to the water front, and finally along the water then back up to the market.  It was fabulous and I too over 500 pictures.  (I bracketed a lot so really it was around 200 images).

Chris and I grabbed some lunch in Seattle and then headed home.  I then loaded the car with LOADS of camera gear and went off to shoot my first High School Senior photo shoot (more on that in the future too).  2 Hours later I was all done and headed home totally knackered!

Got in at 6:30pm – What a day!

I should say here that while the weather started off wet, once the walking tour started everything dried up and even the sun came out.  So it was a complete success.  I have loads of cool images to post, but Abi selected tonight’s shot.  We checked out the entrance of the city Art Museum while on the tour and they had these amazing cars hanging from the ceiling with neon (or LED, not sure) lights coming out of the cars.  It was very “arty” and looked fantastic!  I took loads of shots and selected this one as my favorite to post.  I think there were five cars in total, here I’m catching two of them.  The problem was, the lights kept blinking on and off and timing it right to get the picture below took a long time.  In the end I just held the shutter down to get the lights right and the result was great.

Really good day, love using Shutter Tours (here is their website, check them out: http://www.shuttertours.com/), and got some great shots.

The guys are getting stressed out waiting for the new Halo game to come out.  So they decided to try some Yoga to relax.

Paris – Las Vegas

21. September 2012 · Comments Off on Paris – Las Vegas · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Tonight I thought I’d post another hotel from Las Vegas.  This time it’s Paris.  Now I should remind everyone before I write this that I am British (yes I’m American too, but I was born and brought up in England).  So it shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who’s reading this that I’m not a big fan of France.  Yes I love their wine and cheese and am quite jealous of their lovely weather, but that’s about it.

I’ve visited France many times and can honestly say it’s not my favorite place.  To some extent most French people (from my experience) are not huge fans of the Brits, so the “love to hate” relationship is mutual.  I won’t bore you with all the history details (that doesn’t go back as far as you’d think) but it is what it is.

So what better place for an English guy to enjoy the Eiffel Tower and French Cuisine that Las Vegas!  I mean it’s perfect.  Enjoy some great restaurants and still feel good about myself in the morning.

This picture was taken one night from outside the Bellagio, which is across the road from Paris.  The hotel looked amazing with the Eiffel Tower and big balloon and the gold lights on the hotel.  There was a lot of traffic so I had to shoot above the cars but I don’t think it hurt the image.  So while I’m not going back to Paris France, I might well stay here.

Carter paired his Windows Phone with a Jawbone Bluetooth speaker and then got down to some cool tunes!

Freemont Street – Las Vegas

20. September 2012 · Comments Off on Freemont Street – Las Vegas · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I really wanted to post a Freemont Street picture from my trip to Las Vegas, but none of them turned out that great.  For example in this example I didn’t get the Freemont neon sign in the image at the top of the frame!  What was I thinking.

If you’ve ever been to Freemont in Vegas you probably understand the problem.  There are a lot of distractions here and I may not have been focused (mentally) on doing a great job.  But as it was such a funny evening I thought I’d post the image and tell you about it.

I think this was the Friday night after the conference and we wanted to go to Freemont to capture some cool neon lights.  So we jumped in a cab and off we set.  Now this is really down-town Las Vegas and not that far from the strip.  But on this Friday night the traffic was unbelievably bad.  We were sat in one lane on the freeway (I’ve no idea why we took the freeway) while everyone else went past.  When you are in a strange city you really have to trust your taxi driver, but this guy was taking liberties.  Eventually we got off the freeway and he then changed into the lane that had been driving past us for the last 5 minutes.  When we arrived at Freemont Street and the charge was $45!

Apparently the reason for the bad traffic was there was a Gay Rights Pride march through town and the place was packed with people.  You have NEVER seen anything like it, it was actually pretty funny.  Like the strip there were numerous people in costume waiting for you to ask them to pose for a picture, only this time the costumes were a little more “mature” in nature.  I won’t elaborate here but if you see me ask.  Needless to say I have lots of interesting pictures that I’ll never post here.

After an hour there all the lights went off and we were treated to a video rock concert on the ceiling.  Pretty fun but I kept checking my wallet as it was a pick pockets dream.  While we watched the show above we did encounter one baby in a stroller staring up and his face was a picture.  Pity I didn’t capture it.

Anyway I captured the shot below that does show the neon lights overhead pretty well.  The people in the image at the bottom of the picture were pretty clear and some weren’t “family friendly” so I blurred them deliberately.  This is however one time where I wish I was back there with my side angle lens.  I’d love to try and capture this street again.  Maybe next year.

The guys decided to have a walkie talkie conversation tonight, but they probably should have stood further apart.

High Scaler – Hoover Dam

19. September 2012 · Comments Off on High Scaler – Hoover Dam · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Tonight’s picture captures another sculpture from Hoover Dam.  This piece of art work is pretty new though, the piece was commissioned in 1998 and depicts one of the most dangerous jobs required to build the dam.  The job is called a High Scaler and involves sitting in a little “bosun’s chair” and being suspended hundreds of feet in the air and setting charges into the face of the canyon’s walls to remove lose rock!  The status is based on Joe Kine who carried out this job for a few large dams in the 1930s and 1940s.  The monument is dedicated to the 98 men who lost their life during the dams construction and actually sits on the visitors car park.

So as you drive up you see this statue and it grabs your eye immediately, it’s really impressive.  We parked up and I immediately ran to the sculpture to get a picture.  Unfortunately the statue was back lit and my first few shots captured a great silhouette.  It took me a few attempts to get the angle right so I could light the front of the statue.  Ideally I would have had a flash with me to light it up even more, but it was ridiculously hot and we couldn’t be bothered to go back to the car to get them. (That’s terrible to admit but the truth).   So I made do and eventually go the shot below.

The statue is not that high off the floor (around 6 feet).  But I didn’t want the floor in the shot so I had to get quite close.  But I love the blue sky in the background the and red rock he’s climbing.  When I got home I was very pleased with the image and think it came out well.

Sometimes at night you just need a nice bowl of cereal.  The guys saw a commercial on TV and ran to get out some Life!

Mandalay Bay Restaurant – Las Vegas

18. September 2012 · Comments Off on Mandalay Bay Restaurant – Las Vegas · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

I’m not sure why we like the images we do, I guess it’s all down to personal taste.  Sometimes there’s an image with an interesting subject that attracts you, other times it’s a place you’ve been to or want to visit, maybe even someone you love or care for.  Hopefully you like an image because it creates an emotion of some kind in the viewer.  But every now and then you find a picture that you like but you don’t really know why.

Tonight’s image kind-a falls into that category.  Truth be told I know why I like the image, but it’s not obvious.  I think the literal definition of photography comes from Greece and means “drawing with light”, and it’s not until you really start to dabble in photography that you start to learn how important light is.  The reality is it doesn’t matter how amazing or beautiful a subject is, it it’s badly lit it won’t be a great photograph.  Learning to manipulate late and use it well is a never ending challenge.  This is something I’m still working on

One of the reasons I like HDR photography is that you get to draw with light after the fact.  Sometimes when you take a picture you can’t control the light, you can’t manipulate it how you want and you get what you get.  With HDR you take multiple images with different exposures and when you get home you create a new image by merging the images together, taking the light from each picture to produce the desired result.

Today’s image was taken at the Mandalay Bay. We walked past this restaurant every day and there was never anyone in it.  I loved the lighting and thought it would make a great HDR.  This was made up from 3 separate images and then merged together in Photomatix and Photoshop.  While the direct lights are a little bright they don’t detract from the image.  In the end I think the image came out pretty well.

The Halo guys decided to play on their climbing frame today, lots of exercise, loads of fun.

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