Fruit – Pike Place Market

04. May 2012 · Comments Off on Fruit – Pike Place Market · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Pike Place Market is of course a food market and while it’s probably most famous for it’s fish, they also sell a lot of fruit, vegetables and flowers.  Most people tend to hang around the fish store by Rachel the pig waiting for that elusive shot where they guys throw the fish.  Trust me you can wait all day.  The people who work there actually get a little angry if you ask them to “perform”, they will just tell you to buy some fish (which I guess is fare enough)!  So instead I go the for other stalls to get some pictures.

They also have a number of clothes and art/craft stalls where you can by anything from woodcarvings and paintings to clocks and hats!  But these stalls are very small and I always feel a little uncomfortable standing there with a camera pointing at the sellers.

So that just leaves flowers, fruit and veg.  You can get some nice shots here, as the stalls are very big and well lit.  The food also looks fantastic, very appetizing with examples of food types cut open so you can see the quality of the produce.  A great example is below in today’s picture.  What’s more the people at these stores don’t mind you taking pictures, they sometimes even pose for you too.

Here I wanted to get in nice and close and used a very big aperture that had two benefits.  Firstly I it gave me more light into the camera (which is always good) and secondly it gave me a very narrow depth of field (so the fruit in the center is in focus and the edges around the fruit are not).  All in all a successful picture.

At work today I sent the guys to the stationary room to get some stuff.  Took them a while but they got me a new pen!

Pike Place Market – Seattle

03. May 2012 · Comments Off on Pike Place Market – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

You really can’t go to Pike Place Market without taking a picture of the famous market sign.  Most people take a shot facing Rachel the pig with the sign above them.  And in truth I took one of those pictures too and it looks great (you’ll probably see that later in the year) but I wanted to do something different for my first “Pike Place posting”.

So today’s image is a shot of Pike Place Market (and the sign) from the left hand side (next to the magazine and paper shop).  I liked the road going down to under the market and the fact that the cover on the right over the sidewalk leads the eye directly to the sign.  I think it would have been nicer if the car and the “dude” wasn’t there but you can’t have everything.

Of course having a blue sky helped this image but I think capturing the market from a different perspective hopefully catches the attention.  It was funny though that while there I tried several different angles.  One was from the floor outside a fruit and vegetable store.  I was lying on the floor (honestly) trying to compose the shot when someone knocked over a bucket with flowers in the store and the water started to run towards me.  There were loads of people shouting “Look out, you’re gonna get wet”.  Watching me rush to get up with camera bags and gear… I must have looked a right wally!

Carter found some moisturizer in the office and decided to make Master Chief’s body nice and soft!  I have no idea how he convinced Master Chief to let him do this.

Starbucks – Pike Place Market

02. May 2012 · Comments Off on Starbucks – Pike Place Market · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

When you say Seattle, people tend to think of two things, rain and coffee.  On the coffee front, Seattle is the home of Starbucks, those incredibly clever people who figured out how to charge you over $3 for a cup of coffee.

Starbucks was founded on March 30, 1971 and got it’s name from the book Moby-Dick (the chief mate was called Starbuck).  For the first five years the store was located in Western Avenue in Seattle, but then relocated to this store in Pike Place Market.  So while they say this is the first Starbucks shop, it isn’t really.

Anyway let’s pretend it is – everybody does.  So the owners started off with this one store, and grew to the point where they now have almost 20,000 in 58 countries around the world.  With nearly 13,000 coffee shops or outlets in the US alone driving around Seattle you’d think half of them were here! Starbucks are everywhere, in fact you find them in the same location on opposite sides of the road, they even have a coffee shop at the top of the Space Needle.  And of course Starbucks coffee is sold in all the Microsoft cafeteria’s on campus.

What really drives the coffee association home is that not only do we have Starbucks, but we also have Tully’s.  As you walk/drive around Seattle, across the road from every Starbucks is a Tully’s and here’s the funny bit – they are both FULL of people.  HOW MUCH COFFEE CAN A CITY DRINK?  Clearly the answer is a lot.  Locals have their favorites too, you either love Tully’s or you love Starbucks.  I have no idea how much money is made in Seattle through coffee sales but I bet it’s a hell of a lot – all because of a little coffee bean.

And it all started here.

I’ve taken pictures of this Starbucks in Pike Place Market before but didn’t really like any of the images when I got home. I don’t know why but this one came out OK.  Maybe I like it because it’s not full of people (normally I’m here on Saturday’s and you can’t move in the store).

The guys got excited today when they found my office fridge.  They seemed really happy when they opened the door.

More Shops – Pike Place Market

01. May 2012 · Comments Off on More Shops – Pike Place Market · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Odd picture tonight.  I was walking around Pike Place Market looking for inspiration when I saw this sign saying “More Shops”.  I immediately thought of Lisa!  Those of you that know Lisa understand that for her shopping is an almost religious experience, so I thought I’d capture the shot.

This area is under Pike Place Market.  If you haven’t visited before the food and flower market itself is on the same level as the road and sidewalk.  But you can “kind-a” go downstairs underneath the food/flower bit and find loads of small eclectic stores.  They sell some weird stuff down there, lot’s of ornaments and specialist shopping (my Dad would say “It’s all toot”, but it’s fun to check out).

This sign and lights were on the roof of the middle floor as you go down a ramp to the bottom floor.  So I’m standing almost at sign height (although back quite a long way).  There were quite a lot of people milling about but I wasn’t interested in any of them.  In fact for this shot I wasn’t interested in anything other than the lights and signs.  Hence the composition.

So a little strange but I like and Lisa does too, so this is tonight’s posting.

I should also point out today that we are now officially one third through the year!  Yes it’s day 122 so I only have to do all this two more times, just as a warning after that I will be moving to a weekly posting (this image a day is killing me).

Apparently last night Master Chief went off to make some cocktails and never came back.  Carter found him today encased in ice!  We have no idea what happened.

Gasworks Park – Seattle

30. April 2012 · Comments Off on Gasworks Park – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Today was a fantastic day!  I had the day off work and everyone in the family had something on (school for the kids and work for Lisa) so I was left to my own devices.  So this morning I got up as they left the house and headed out with my camera gear on my own.  I spent time in Pike Place Market, the Seattle Public Library (yes I went back), and Gasworks Park.

Gasworks Park is a 20 acre public park on the north shore of Lake Union overlooking downtown Seattle.  It’s the former site of the Seattle Gas Light company’s “Gasification Plant” (and no I didn’t make that up).  The park still has a number of old machines left from when the plant shut down.  Some of it is fenced off, but there’s a play barn and picnic shelter that has loads of old machines that have been painted bright colors.

This is a really cool park, they even have a man-made kite flying hill to help you get loads of wind.  While I was there a woman was at the top of the hill flying her stunt kite.

Anyhow, hopefully you can see from the picture below just how cool the play barn is.  The best bit was that as today was a work day, nobody was there!  I had the place completely to myself and got the chance to take loads of really cool pictures.  As I’ve posted some “right out of the camera” shots over the last couple of days, I thought I’d go in the other direction.  This is a 5 shot HDR image.  For those that don’t know, that stands for High Dynamic Range and allows me to photograph subjects that have very dark and very light areas.

(Here is the technical bit – stop reading if you want) Now the human eye can take in around 14 stops of light, but a digital camera can only do high single digits.  This is why when you see something cool and take a picture it doesn’t always look the same.  Using multiple images, each of which is taken with a different exposure (i.e. some are dark and some are light), you can mix them together in special software to get a composite image the shows you the dark shadows without “blowing out” the highlights.  This is HDR.  I won’t lie I really love this process, I find I can better reproduce what I actually saw, and usually even make it better.

I know I said no more tulips, but our Halo heroes felt they didn’t get their chance to pay homage to spring and the tulip extravaganza I’ve been on for the last couple of weeks.  Here is their one and only tulip image.

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