The trouble with night time shots of piers, is that once you take one, you kind of want to take them all!  This time I visited Lake Washington on the Kirkland side and found this small pier.  The sun was setting on the other side of the lake and behind me was this very bright street light (that’s why the pier is so well lit up).

This picture came out pretty well and I particularly like the sky with the orange sunset and mottled clouds.  At the end of the day (no pun intended) it’s pretty hard to mess a scene like this up, but all is not necessarily what it seems.

This is another long exposure, this is necessary to get enough light into the camera to light up the subject.  This also has the added benefit of making the water look smooth and calm.  In reality it was a little windy so the water was choppy.  But this looks much prettier.  The result of all this is what you see below and isn’t really what I saw.  Sure I could see a bit of the pier, but the end was in darkness.  The sky looked nice but not as cool as in the image and the water, was much rougher.

So you kind of have to imagine what the end result will be when you do this.  I’m getting better at that and am less surprised these days with the end result.  You learn to “see” the landscape in a different way when you take the image.  This is why people come up to you when you are shooting and ask “what are you doing”.  They can’t see it.

The only problem was that there was a group of people sitting on the pier at the end, as it was pretty dark I couldn’t really make them out but they looked teenager’ish.  Anyway thanks to Photoshop they are no longer there – I love Photoshop.

Carter and Master Chief were trying out some new carpet samples today, I think Master Chief found the one he wants.