Foot Bridge – Bellevue

25. October 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

Tonight I had the opportunity to join my new team for dinner in Bellevue.  We had a reservation in Daniels Broiler (which by the way is a lovely restaurant) at 6:30, but I thought it might be nice to get into the city a little early and grab some pictures.

The center of Bellevue has some fantastic restaurants and a really great shopping mall.  Most of the shops and restaurants are positioned around the same part of town, an intersection between Bellevue Way and NE 8th St.  On one corner of the intersection is the Hyatt hotel and Daniels Broiler, on another corner (across the road) is a large shopping and office area called Lincoln Square and joining the two together is this funky walking bridge across the road.

My plan was to walk onto the bridge and shoot some of the cars driving past on the roads below but as I approached the bridge I thought it might make a good image in it’s own right.  Luckily my timing was really good and got a couple of shots of the bridge with nobody on it.  As the bridge has a lot of chrome, glass and lights it looked really cool.

Of course once I took this the world decided to come across the bridge, so I was lucky to get this shot.  Then I moved to the center of the bridge and started shooting traffic.  I got some nice shots but really liked the bridge image best so that’s what I’m posting tonight.

The boys were going out this evening for a night on the town.  I caught them getting ready before heading out.

Olympics Ferry – Seattle

24. October 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

Last week (if you remember) I got up at the crack of dawn and drove over to Alki in West Seattle to shoot a sunrise.  I got some amazing images as the sun was coming up and the city looked really great – lots of lights with blue skies etc.

Anyway after the sun was up I was looking for other things to shoot, and I walked further along the peninsular until I got this view of the Bainbridge Ferry going across Elliott Bay.  While the ferry is nice, that wasn’t what caught my eye.  The sun had risen high enough to hit the Olympic Mountain Range and the light in the clouds and the mountains looked amazing.

The color of the sky above the clouds was also a cool green blue, I guess the sun was affecting the sky’s color but the end result was pretty cool.  The resultant image has these great layers, there’s the sky above the clouds, the clouds, the mountains, the tree line and the water.  Each with different textures and colors.

Today Master Chief and Carter were showing each other their new kindle paperwhites.

Anker – Seattle

22. October 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

The other day at work some of the guys in my team asked me about image processing, so I promised to bring in my computer and show them what I do.  So after three days of forgetting I finally remembered to take in my computer and today we looked at the apps I use.

At one point one of them asked about HDR images and asked how you create them and why bother.  So I went looking for an example to show them what you can do.  After searching for a couple of minutes I found this anker picture that I took on Saturday morning on Alki just after the sun had come up.  I bracket pictures quite a lot and had three images of the anker with different exposures.  So I dropped them into Photomatix and tonemapped the result.

Then I post processed the image in Photoshop, removing some dust spots and blurry seagulls. Next I tidied up grass a little, got rid of some purple fringing and selected a bush that wasn’t moving about from one of the master images to replace the blurry one I had in the tonemapped image.  The picture had an unsightly public sign in it so I covered that up with some long grass, and finally I lightened the sky, HDR tends to give you black clouds and while the sky did look dramatic, there were no black clouds.

Once I’d done all that I applied a couple of Nik Software filters, one to apply a sunrise effect, the other to add a vignette.  Having completed the work we compared the original normal exposure image and the one I’d post processed.  The funny thing was I really liked the finished image and this wasn’t one I was planning on posting.  So this is kind of a free-be.

So that’s the image I’m posting tonight.

Now of course the guy I showed all this to is planning on buying a load of software – his wife is going to kill me!

Abi had a great gymnastics meet yesterday and got 5 medals – 3 of them were 1st place (one was best overall) – so the guys tried them on.

Morning Cityscape – Seattle

20. October 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , , ,

So I have quite a lot on at the moment, I’m taking a picture a day (that takes a load of time), we have just gone through a re-org at work and I have loads to do there, and for some ridiculously stupid reason I decided to do a photography course at Bellevue College.  I have no idea why I signed up for this and this morning I really regretted it!

Why this morning? Because I had to be in Alki, West Seattle at 7am on a Saturday!  Which meant I needed to get up at 6am, seriously sad news.  So why did I have to be there?  Well the course is called “Shoot to Show” and is all about shooting images that you can then frame and show and sell.  We had to pick a theme for our images, and decided on “Beginning or End of day”.  So this morning we all arrived in West Seattle to photograph a sun rise.

Anyway I got there around 6:40 and this was one of the first shots I took.  The sun hadn’t really come up yet, so the city was all lite up and looked really great across the water.  The lights from the city were reflected across the water and the sky was  almost black.  So I set up the tripod and too some pictures.

This picture was a 30 second exposure, so long that the sky looked light blue.  I took a few shots at the waters edge and the images looked great, but I really wanted some foreground interest.  So I stepped back from the water and set up behind a bench and took the image below.  I really liked the end result, the bench looked great and you can even see some grass under the bench.  And then in the distance you have the beautiful city of Seattle.  Pretty cool.

As Lisa and Abi have now decorated the house, Carter and Master Chief are now playing with all the Halloween “stuff”, tonight it’s Boo!

Chevrolet Truck – Redmond

18. October 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I went to the movies tonight after work (went to see Argo, it was really good I can definitely recommend it) and got home pretty late.  So I had to hit my backlog store for an image for the day.  (I still found time to shoot my Halo dudes but the serious picture is from earlier this year.)

I actually have a pretty large collection of backlog images and ended up selecting this view of a yellow Chevy Truck that I shot on August 12th.  This was shot at one of the Redmond Exotics car shows which don’t usually have trucks so it was a bit of a novelty.  The owner had opened up the truck hood and it looked all clean and shiny inside (nothing like my car) and there was so much chrome on the front it was well worth shooting from this perspective.

I find the best pictures for vehicles are taken low down on the ground.  It gives you a different perspective of the car or truck and usually looks cool.  This picture was no exception and think it came out well.

Carter found Lisa’s stash of English candy today and we caught him eating a “Pear Drop”.

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