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.

Bainbridge Ferry – Seattle

28. July 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

Today my photography buddy Chris Pearson and I decided to take a ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island and see what we could shoot.  So at 8am this morning I picked Chris up and we hit the road.  We got to Seattle pretty quickly, the roads were relatively empty at that time and drove to the ferry port.  We got there at the exactly right time to drive straight onto a waiting ferry and cross Elliott Bay.

I guess 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday is too early for most as the ferry was empty and we got the chance to take some shots of Seattle as we left, and Bainbridge as we arrived.  On the way over the sky was very overcast and it looked like it was about to rain, fortunately as the morning drew on it got warmer and warmer and blue sky even came out.

I got some really good pictures on Bainbridge Island and will post those in the coming week, but tonight’s picture was of the ferry as it approached Bainbridge to take us home to Seattle.  Chris and I parked up near the front of the line to get on the ferry and had time to walk down to the ferry port ramp where you drive from the Island onto the ferry.  I took this picture as the ferry was coming in.

I liked this image as I caught the ferry as it was about to turn towards dock and had the Seattle skyline in the background.  I also liked the depth of field in this picture too with the dock just out of focus.  It doesn’t look it here but it was quite warm by this time with blue sky poking through the clouds.

We had a really good day and I got a good dozen postable images, and for 6 hours that’s really good.

Here’s Carter enjoying a run on the beach.  Clearly the sand is very wet as his feet are sinking!

Elliott Bay Sunset – Seattle

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

Tonight I’m posting another image from last nights visit to Seattle.  Shortly after I got there I caught a ferry coming in as another was going out.  The sun was really over the Olympics mountain range but the sky was a great orange, red color.

It was getting dark at this time so I had to shoot either with a long exposure or with high ISO. As the ferry was moving, long exposures were out, it would just look like a blur going across the water, so I had to ramp the ISO up on the D4.

Now with my older camera, if I went above 800 ISO the picture had a load of “noise”, this looked like heavy grain in the image, almost like a really old picture from the early 1900s.  Sometimes this looks cool, but only sometimes, so high ISO was kind of useless on my old camera.  But this D4 is amazing.  I pumped up the ISO on this image to around 6400 and managed to get a stationary ferry with a nice exposure with very little noise.

I love the orange sky in this shot and the black clouds, catching both ferries cross paths also get some strong foreground interest.

Carter found a bracelet that he liked and started wearing it around the house.  Not to be outdone, Master Chief did the same.