Baubles – Seattle

16. December 2012 · Comments Off on Baubles – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Once again the weather was terrible today, but I needed to go out and figured it will probably stop by the time I get to Seattle if I drove there!  I also asked myself how wet could I get?  Well I was totally wrong on the rain stopping, and I found out that you can get VERY wet, walking around in heavy rain with a camera (duh)!

I drove to Seattle Center (by the Space Needle) as I’d heard they had a lot of holiday lights up there and I thought it might make a nice picture.  As my goal was to take pictures of the holiday lights, I needed to get there late in the day, so I left home at 2:30 in the afternoon and drove into the city.  This week parking was no problem, but if you saw the rain coming down you’d realize why.  Nobody was going to go to the Space Needle in this weather, apart from me that is.  I parked across the road from the Needle in the Komo4 TV car park and walked over (in the rain) to see what I could get.

One of the benefits of rain is that you can get some really nice reflection pictures in puddles, but you need the rain to stop!  If not, you just get blurry water which doesn’t look any good.  So that was out!  But despite all my complaining, I did get some nice pictures, and for a change, Lisa picked the first one I’m posting.

Outside the Space Needle is this circular drive with a small fountain in the middle.  By the Needle is a pickup spot where you can drive up and drop off or pick people up.  It’s also where you leave your car if you are valet parking.  Well this area is covered.  No walls but a roof that covers around 100 feet of sidewalk.  Hanging from the roof were these lit up baubles (the only thing I can think of calling them).  They were really pretty and there were loads of them.

This is my first picture.  I could stand under cover and shoot over the heads of people waiting and still get a great shot.  It was pretty windy though and the balls were swinging a little in the wind.  So I had to bump up my ISO so I could get a fast shutter speed to “freeze” the motion.  When I got home I found the images had a little noise but removed that pretty easily in Photoshop.  Other than that, this is exactly what I saw.  Hope you like this one, we do at home.

You can’t get the the end of December without trying to make a ginger bread house!  While this one isn’t made out of ginger bread it’s pretty close.

Tree Tony – Home

15. December 2012 · Comments Off on Tree Tony – Home · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

I did go out today to take some pictures but it was pretty bad weather again.  It was actually snowing at home, but in Bellevue (where I decided to go) it was coming down pretty hard.  I drove around looking for something interesting to shoot but it was not nice, so I headed home all depressed.  Of course that means I’m going out again tomorrow.

But Lisa came up with the idea of shooting one of the Christmas trees.  She suggested I get a narrow depth of field shot of one light in focus with the others behind all blurry, but when I was setting up the camera I noticed some of the ornaments.  It appears that last year Lisa got some new ones, actually buying one of each of the family.  Now to be honest, I put the trees up and Lisa and the kids decorate them so I had no idea what the ornaments are.  So when I saw a little Tony, I had to shoot that.

I kind of took the picture Lisa suggested but with a different twist.  It’s a little more fun than a serious shot of the tree.

Carter was hanging on to joy today, not saying he’s depressed or anything, but he wasn’t letting go!

Outside Workshop – Seattle

14. December 2012 · Comments Off on Outside Workshop – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

It’s weekend time again folks so tomorrow I’m off out to get some new pictures.  But for tonight we have another shot from the Center for Wooden Boats.  If you go there you can sign up for a workshop and learn how to fix your own wooden boat.  If you attend a class, this is where you go.

They have this shed area where you have the lessons and stay undercover when you do – what ever you do when you fix boats.  I took this shot as it was quite dark under the roof and I wanted to see if I could get the interior to come out.  This picture was heavily processed but it was only one shot.  I managed to bring out the shadows in the ceiling and still now blow out the outside.

I really liked visiting this place it was pretty cool.  If I wasn’t completely allergic to exercise I might even be tempted to take a row boat out, but lets not go nuts!

Tonight the guys decided that one of them should sit at the top of a tree.  They rock, paper, scissor’d for it and Red won.

Another Boat – Seattle

13. December 2012 · Comments Off on Another Boat – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I really hope you like boats, as I still have some more to post.  One of the challenges around this “post a picture a day” resolution is that I visit somewhere, take a load of pics, and then don’t go out again until all the pictures are posted.  So you tend to get all the images from one location together.  What I should have done, is visited a few places and rotated images from each location, so it’s not so boring.  Maybe next time I do this I’ll try that.  WHAT AM I SAYING – I’m never doing this again and only have 18 days left – I’m SOOOOO excited.

OK, so about the image.  I was at the Center for Wooden Boats (obviously) and saw this boat mored against the jetty.  What caught my eye was the reflection in the water.  It was so clear (almost like a mirror) that I couldn’t take the shot quick enough.  I also loved the fact that the colors appeared so well in the water.  You can see the blue sky and blue and yellow flags and white posts.

I composed this so that there was more water than land deliberately, but of course Lisa on seeing this said “but you can’t see the reflected things above”!  I actually liked this composition and had another one where you couldn’t see the real boat at all.  But that just looked like an upside down slightly blurry picture so I didn’t select that one for posting.

Anyway, if you get the chance to visit the The Center for Wooden Boats I really recommend it.

Master Chief decided to visit Carter’s new house today, it’s very cool and rather festive!

Boat Workshop – Seattle

12. December 2012 · Comments Off on Boat Workshop – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I was walking around the Center for Wooden Boats taking pictures and some girl walked past me who obviously worked there.  So I asked her if it was OK to shoot and grab some shots (I know it is ok, they don’t mind – but it never hurts to ask).  So she said “Yes of course, thanks for asking” with big smile.  I guess people don’t usually ask her.  So them she asked if I wanted to shoot a picture in their main workshop.  I’m not sure if people are allowed in there but she was all friendly and offered so I jumped at the chance.

The workshop was very cool.  It was a wooden building with a long wooden bench against the wall that was covered with tools.  There was also a boat in there that they were working on  and there were sails hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the room was some guy working on something small at his desk.

I set the camera on a tripod in the corner and composed a nice shot to include the boat in the foreground and the tools and bench at the back.  This picture was five exposures all one stop apart.  (Basically I took 5 pictures starting with a very dark one, and subsequent shots with double the amount of light in each).  When I got home I put the 5 pictures into Photomatix and “tonemapped” them into a single high dynamic range picture.  You have probably heard of this as HDR.

So why do this?  Why is HDR interesting?  Our eyes are just amazing, people think their eyes have enormous field of vision which is kind of true (it’s almost 180 degrees), but really you only focus on about 5 degrees at a time everything else is blurred.  We overcome this by moving our eyes around a scene all the time.  Your eyes also manage dynamic range this way too (how much light and dark we can see), by moving our eyes, we can see in shadow areas and bright areas at different times, but you walk away remembering everything.  Unfortunately, cameras dynamic range sucks.  When you take a picture the camera try’s to expose for as much as possible, but in scenes like this where there is bright light and dark shadows, the camera will fail, there will always be areas you don’t see.  By creating an HDR image you really get to “see” what you would have seen if you where there.

That’s why I LOVE HDR.  It can turn a boring image into an amazing one.

A couple of the guys were trying to move a present today, but something was stopping them – or at least making the job much harder.

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