If you ever come to Seattle there are LOADS of places to visit and things to do, but one of my favorites is Boeing’s Museum of Flight.  In case you didn’t know Boeing – those are the people who make the big jumbo jets, are based in Seattle and most of their big planes are made or assembled here.  Anyway they happen to have their own museum that has a load of both old second world war planes along with some more modern military and commercial planes.

So Sunday morning I just felt like going out and grabbing some pictures so headed off to Boeing Field to visit the museum.

I got there around 11am and it was pretty quiet, which was odd as it was suck a beautiful day, I thought loads of people would have turned up!  But I used the lack of visitors to my advantage and got some great shots.

This museum is a great place to practice my HDR photography.  This is a technique where I take multiple shots of the same subject each with different “exposures”. (This means some are dark and some are bright).  Then when I get home use special software to blend the images together to create one picture.

HDR images don’t have any super bright blown out highlights or really dark shadows, you can bring out details in the entire scene.  One of the best examples is if you are shooting a subject that’s back lit.  For example something inside with a window behind.  With HDR both the indoors subject looks great AND the outside is clear (you can see examples of this down below).

A big challenge of HDR is that you really need to put your camera on a tripod, this allows you to have longer exposures (that would have been blurry due to hand shake if you hand held) and also means that the multiple images don’t need to be aligned in post processing.  Now in most museums you can’t use a tripod (they actually get really angry if you try), but luckily the Museum of Flight is ok with them.  So all my images below were shot on a tripod.

I got a lot of shots and had a blast processing them when I got home to produce the images below.  I actually have a load more but these are my favorites.