Tony Seeley Photography

I’ve mentioned that the Japanese Gardens in Seattle have a lot of water, well today’s image is a shot of the biggest lake in the gardens.  The water is a pretty dirty color in the picture and in truth it looks kind-a yucky when I was there.  All around the lake are paths that take you past the water and manicured trees and bushes.  You can see that this was a lovely time to go to the gardens and the fall colors are really beautiful.  I love the reds, oranges and yellows in this image.

I wanted to take this picture but there was a group of kids standing on the bridge at the far end of the lake.  They were laughing and messing about (pretending to throw each other in etc.,) and taking their own pictures.  So I just took a seat and waited.  While I was there a number of other people came by and took a picture and I heard them complaining about the kids on the bridge, but at the end of the day you just have to be patient.  The kids weren’t doing anything wrong, they were just enjoying the gardens and eventually they moved on.  That’s when I took this picture.

The challenge with pictures like this is that I wasn’t allowed to take a tripod into the gardens, so I had to raise the ISO (sensor sensitivity) so I could get a decent (fast) exposure.  Then when I got home I had to de-noise the images and that add’s image artifacts (artifacts are digital errors that appear in the image).  However as my camera is so AWESOME, the noise wasn’t too bad and the image looks great.

Master Chief and Carter were super excited tonight as their copy of Halo 4 arrived.

I thought I’d post another shot from yesterday’s trip to the Seattle Japanese Gardens.  I have to say I’m actually pretty angry with myself as I’ve been doing this “picture a day” thing now for nearly a year and I’ve only just visited the place.  As you can see from the image below, it’s really pretty there, they have a small lake (it’s too big to call it a pond) with little streams or brooks flowing into it from the surrounding hills.

There are large rocks inside all the streams so you can jump from stone to stone to cross, this is if you can’t be bothered to walk to the nearest bridge.  Talking of bridges, there are loads of them and they are all also very cute.  You can imagine what they look like, small wooden curved bridges with handrails on each side.  The gardens are really well manicured and there are bushes and trees surrounding lake.  Some of the bushes are pruned like little banzai trees and look fantastic.

Also interspersed around the gardens are these Japanese stone lanterns – at least that’s what I think they are.  They too are really nice and add to the Japanese feel of the gardens.

At this time of year there are a load of fall colors.  Lots of reds and yellows and really deep greens.  While it wasn’t raining when I was there it was still pretty wet and that kind of made the grass and leaves look quite lush.

So, about the shot.  While I’ve been taking a lot of wide angle landscape pictures lately I’m still learning how to compose good images using ulta wide lenses (it’s not as easy as you’d think).  The most important thing to do (I think) is to get some good foreground interest in the image.  With the wide lenses you have to get very close to something so it takes a prominent position in the picture.  When I say close I mean with-in a foot.  This is what I tried to do in the image below.  The stone lantern looked really nice and I thought it would give the viewer something to start on before they view the rest of the garden.

While part of the lake is in this image it’s not really that important.  This one is really all about the stone lantern and the bushes and trees.  You can see that the sky was a little gray, but this did provide a nice soft light for pictures, it’s just a pity is wasn’t a little brighter.

This isn’t the last image I’ll post from here, and I’ll definitely be going back.  If you get the chance I really recommend checking it out.

The guys decided to make something tonight, so they got out the Lego. They made a nice little car, love the color!