Climbing Wall – Redmond

05. December 2012 · Comments Off on Climbing Wall – Redmond · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I left work tonight a little early at 5pm but it was already dark outside.  But, and this is a huge but, it wasn’t raining.  So I thought I’d try and take a picture on the way home.  At first I figured I’d drive into Redmond Town Center and see if I could get a nice shot of the city lights (they light all the trees around the shops and it looks very pretty).  But on the way I had another idea.

In Marymoor Park they have this huge rock climbing structure.  Now I knew it wan’t lit at night so knew it would be very dark, but I had an idea.  So I parked up in Marymoor and grabbed my camera bag and tripod and walked over the the climbing wall.  The wall is a pretty impressive structure, almost a piece of art actually, all angles and overhangs and it’s also enclosed in a high metal fence that goes all the way round.  I’m not sure what the fence is for but the gate was open so I went in and set up.

I put the camera on the tripod and set it on a 30 second exposure with a relatively small aperture, so when I took a picture you couldn’t really see any details in the structure at all, it was basically in silhouette.  Then I got out my flashlight and when I pressed the shutter, I started to paint the climbing wall with the light.  The result is tonights image.

The flashlight I used is an LED light, pretty strong but the color of the light was very different to the ambient light being thrown from the distant street lamps.  So the wall had a blue hue, which actually looked pretty good.

I took quite a few pictures as I was having problem focussing on the wall before I pressed the shutter.  It was so dark the camera couldn’t find focus.  So there I was in the dark shining a flashlight on the wall.  It must have looked pretty odd.  Some women was standing outside the fence with her dogs, I think she wanted to come inside but was concerned that there was some strage dude with a flashlight – I sure she couldn’t see or understand what I was doing.

Anyway the end result came out pretty well.  I liked the sky above and you can make out the fence and near by buildings and trees.  I also like the fact that the street lamp was throwing orange light and the flashlight blue – this is normally a photographers nightmare but here I think it added to the image.   Well at least it’s different (which is what Lisa usually say’s when she doesn’t like the picture).

Don’t know how this happened but Master Chief got trappend in a huge candle holder!  Took him ages to get out.

Tree Lights – Redmond

04. December 2012 · Comments Off on Tree Lights – Redmond · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I mentioned in a posting the other day that over the weekend Lisa, Abi and I attended the “Redmond Lights” event.  By the town hall they had this massive tree (and I really mean it was huge) covered with lights.  There were loads of normal lights and some that appeared to animate, I guess because of the size of the tree it was just impressive.

Anyway I took a few shots of this tree from different points of view.  When I got home Lisa and I looked at the pictures and a heated discussion ensued over which image was best.  I think in the end we got it down to two pictures, this one below and another that had another large tree in the foreground that was beautifully lit up with orange lights.  In the end we couldn’t agree on the best image so I followed a tried and trusted approach to pick the right one to post.

So here is Lisa’s favorite picture.

Obviously its pretty dark outside so I had to put the camera on a tripod and capture the image with a long exposure.  I should state that if I didn’t do that, one of two things would have happened.  Either everything would have been very very dark (except for the lights) or everything would have been very blurry.

Having said that of course you can see the people under the tree are very blurry as they are all walking around.  I did my best to clean them up but if I made any more modifications it would have looked very fake.

One thing that struck me was the color of the sky in this image compared with the color of the sky in other ones.  If I stood further back, the sky was blue and black, but when I was closer the sky had an almost orange hue.  The reason for this is the tree to the left.  This was covered in orange light and the closer I got to the tree the more light spilled into the camera and affected the ambiant sky color (wow how technical is that!)

I have to say that this month is proving to be the hardest month of the year.  It’s really not because of a lack of desire to go out and take pictures, it just that when I leave the office at the end of the day it’s totally black outside and raining.  But I only have 27 days to go (can’t believe that) and I really want to end on a high! So I checked with Lisa and have been assured that this weekend we have nothing planned and I’m going out to shoot loads of pictures no matter what.

The guys decided to do some wall climbing tonight.  They did pretty well too.

Night Reflection – Bellevue

03. December 2012 · Comments Off on Night Reflection – Bellevue · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

The weather out side is not great at the moment – well I do live in Seattle so what do you expect?  Anyway we are getting a lot of rain right now so I’m having to be “creative” finding new pictures to post.  Tonight is no exception so we are going back to warmer/dryer evenings in Bellevue Downtown Park.

This picture was taken in the park after sunset.  They have this large expanse of grass in the middle of the park and all around the grass is this long curved walking path.  Next to the path is a collection of small ponds (really it’s a water feature) that also goes around the park.  Well I found that if I stood in a specific place I could capture the path, some of the water and reflections of the larger buildings in downtown in the water.

As the sky had this great blue color (remember this is after the sunset) and the lights around the park were on and the buildings were lit up I got a great composition and I think a nice picture.  Hopefully you like it too.

I’d start hoping for nice or at least dry weather or you are going to get some pretty poor pics for the remainder of December.

I spoke to Carter tonight and he said he felt on top of the world!  No idea why.

Carousel – Redmond

01. December 2012 · Comments Off on Carousel – Redmond · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Tonight Lisa, Abi and I went to Redmond to see the “Redmond Lights” event when the city officially turned on its holiday decorations.  The event started at City Hall where they had a number of pretty big trees decorated.  They had loads of kids events too and a carousel (with the longest line of people you have ever seen).  Once you’d seen everything around City Hall, there was a well lit walking trail covering around a mile or so with musicians and entertainers on the way.  They also had a load of christmas decorations on route too.

The city had planned everything out, you were encouraged to leave your car by City Hall and then walk the trail.  Then the City had a number of Microsoft connector coaches at the other end to bring you back to your car.  So off we went.  It was pretty cool, very pretty with loads of things to see on the way.  The problem was the trail wasn’t very wide and it was full of people.  And of course there were those idiots you always get with strollers who were trying to walk in the wrong direction, so it was a little nuts.

We didn’t walk the whole trail as Abi was getting tired, so when we got to Redmond Town Center we cut across town to get back to the start.

Before we started on the walking trail I stopped by the carousel to grab a picture.  Obviously it was full of people when I got there so I waited until the carousel stopped and everyone got off and then got some shots.  Of course as soon as everyone was off the carousel people started getting on again so I had to be quick.  This shot was captured with a wide aperture so I had a narrow depth of field throwing everything in the background out of focus.

Master Chief tonight decided to play a game of Table Tennis.  He lost!

Velodrome – Redmond

27. November 2012 · Comments Off on Velodrome – Redmond · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

When I left work tonight at 7:30 it had been dark outside for nearly 3 hours – how nuts is that?  So I’m driving home and you know what I’m thinking, what am I going to post tonight?  On the way home it was a really nice evening, the moon was full and looked huge and it was dry with a pretty clear sky.  So I decided to look for a night shot.

On my way home is Marymoor Park and they usually have these big flood lit sports fields so I thought it might be interesting to shoot one of those with the moon in shot.  So I detoured off into the park.  Unfortunately there were a load of people playing soccer and the fields were all full.  I really didn’t want to go through the process of asking people if I could shoot them so I looked for something else.

Marymoor is a pretty big park and they have loads of different sections for visitors, one of which is the velodrome.  For those of you who don’t know, a velodrome is a large circular bicycle track for cycle racing.  It has large banked corners so they can ride super fast around the whole track.  Tonight the place was completely empty and totally lit up with these huge flood lights.  So I had complete autonomy to set up wherever I wanted and got the chance to take loads of pictures from different angles.

Obviously I wanted to get the moon in the picture too so ended up selecting the image below.  Here I got the start line on one side and the observation building, some of the bleach seats and the first corner banking off to the left.  I angled the camera a little to accentuate the curve of the track and got the moon in the image too.

All I did for this picture was add a heavy vignette to darken the corners.  Other than that the image is right out of the camera.

Tonight the guys found a drum kit to play with, but all Master Chief could do was kick the drum!

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