Cityscape – Seattle

02. November 2012 · Comments Off on Cityscape – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

You can’t really take a Seattle cityscape picture from across Elliott Bay without capturing the Space Needle.  I actually thought I’d posted one of these before but I checked and I hadn’t.  So while on Alki beach the other day I captured this shot.   I’m actually a huge distance from Seattle’s city center but as I have some long lenses I can capture a shot like this.

Most people think that the Space Needle is in the middle of Seattle, but in reality it’s a pretty long way from the main downtown buildings.  If you try to get everything in together you sort of have to make a choice.  You either just get the Space Needle (as below) or you shoot the downtown area (with the Great Wheel), or of course you can try for a panorama that goes from one side of the city to the other.  These look nice but they are VERY wide – actually if you go to my Guestbook page you can see what I mean.

Anyway, I was on Alki for a sunrise and took this shot.  This image was taken as the sun was starting to come up so the sky’s pretty visible and the lights are still on.  It’s really very pretty watching the sun come up over the city, if you get the chance to go to Alki, I really recommend it.

This is another example of Master Chief getting himself in a difficult situation, it’s clearly nuts!

Cityscape – Seattle

26. October 2012 · Comments Off on Cityscape – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , , ,

Can you believe it, today is day 300 and I haven’t missed a day.  I’m amazed I got this far and can’t stop now with only 66 days left.  Anyway I’m pleased I’ve made it this far, definitely on the home stretch.

So tonight I thought I post another picture from my early morning trip to West Seattle.  If you remember I went there for a sunrise picture and I got there just after 6:30 in the morning.  It was still dark the sun was nowhere near ready to go above the horizon yet, but I still wanted to grab some pictures.

I got the tripod out and set up the camera and started shooting.  The problem I had was that the camera’s meter was trying to make the image look like daylight with a really long exposure.  The result looked ok but it wasn’t what I was seeing.  So I set the camera to manual mode and started to play with different shutter speeds.  Very quickly I go the image I’m posting tonight.  This is pretty much what I saw.

As the exposure was still quite long, the water came out as pretty flat and still, but I still got the city lights across it so I thought it looked pretty cool.  I’m not sure I like the horizon in this picture being in the center of the image, but I liked the buildings and the lights on Elliott Bay, so I left it there.  The Great Wheel looks a little strange as from this angle is it just looks like a white pole, but there’s not much I can do about that.

If you’ve visited my site before you know I love Photoshop, but I can honestly say this is pretty much out of the camera.  I adjusted the contrast a little and sharpened it but that’s all.

Tonight the boys were comparing their Halloween Balls.

Morning Cityscape – Seattle

20. October 2012 · Comments Off on Morning Cityscape – Seattle · 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!

Ferris Wheel – Seattle

09. August 2012 · Comments Off on Ferris Wheel – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

A couple of months ago I posted a picture of the new Seattle ferris wheel (called the “Great Wheel”) at sunset.  To capture that image I stood at the end of a pier, but today’s picture was taken from a ferry in Elliott Bay.  We were approaching the pier and city and I had a few seconds to capture the wheel with the city and Space Needle behind it.

When I took this everything was moving.  I was moving on the ferry as it approached the dock and the wheel was going round.  Luckily it was lovely and sunny so I had loads of light and could shoot the image at a really fast shutter speed, this nicely froze all motion and gave me the picture below.

I’m really pleased I got the Space Needle in the image too, here it looks like it’s close to the tall buildings but it’s pretty far away from downtown.  I think the colors of the piers and the buildings, and the blue sky make a really nice picture – at least I’m pleased with it.

I’ve been told that one of the gondolas on the ferris wheel has a glass bottom.  So I’m really keen to take a ride on that and see what pictures I can get.  I’ll try and do it over the next few weeks so I can get a Summery image and share with you all here on the blog.

Work has been a little manic lately with very early starts and super long days, in the evenings I’m just exhausted so have to rely on weekends to capture new images for the blog.  This week we have family visiting from the UK as well so I suspect we will be going somewhere fun on Saturday or Sunday and I’ll get an opportunity to capture something new – at least that’s my hope.

I try to get out of town at least once a month and go somewhere new on a photo trip and have some very exciting plans coming up, with all sorts of trips like the Olympic National Park, the Oregon Coast and Las Vegas.  I can’t believe I’ve kept this going for 222 days and am confident that I’ll make it to the end of the year.  Trust me when I say I have seriously considered stopping this several times, but with only a few months left and some cool trips on my calendar, the end of this year long resolution is definitely in sight and success feels possible.

Carter and Master Chief are definitely getting into cooking.  Tonight they hand rolled 45 meatballs!

Cityscape – Seattle

01. August 2012 · Comments Off on Cityscape – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

When we left Bainbridge Island on the ferry the sun had definitely come out and we even had patchy blue skies above us.  The ferry ride is about 30 minutes from the Island to the Mainland and Chris and I stood at the ferries bow the whole time photographing everything that crossed our path.  This included another ferry (going in the opposite direction), numerous private boats of various sizes, peoples homes that faced the water front and lots of seagulls flying next to the ferry.

Some of the homes on Bainbridge are just beautiful, I’d love to live there but Lisa would hate it.  While we were driving around the Island it was almost deserted but there aren’t a lot of shops there and no Target!  So Lisa would never move there.

As we approached Seattle I started taking cityscape shots, the sun was shining on the city so a lot of the buildings were bright and shiny and quite colorful.  We have the new ferris wheel in Seattle (not been on that yet) and it was slowly going round so I wanted that in the shot, I also wanted some of the tall buildings in downtown and some of the piers and took the shot below.  As I composed the shot, I saw the plane going past (top of picture) and caught it too – I think this actually adds to the picture.

When people think of Seattle they also think of the Space Needle and while it would be nice to have that in shot too, it’s quite a long way off to the left.  So if you try to get the Needle and downtown in the same shot, it almost has to be a panorama, so no Needle in this image.

Considering I took this on a moving ferry, I think the image came out really well.  It’s also nice having a shot from the water, not always an easy or obvious point of view.

The guys spent a lot of time today watching Kerry Walsh and Misty May, and then decided to have their own beach volleyball game.

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