Christmas Space Needle – Seattle

18. December 2012 · Comments Off on Christmas Space Needle – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

You can’t really go to the Seattle Center with a camera and not take a picture of the Space Needle, that would be just silly! – there’s probably a law somewhere that prohibits that!  So I figured I should take a picture while there on Saturday.  The rain was coming down pretty hard and I was soaked.  But being the “professional” I am, I still got out the tripod and set it up in front of the needle.

At this time of year it’s all lit up and they even have a Christmas Tree in the fountain at the front.  Being Seattle it’s not a traditional tree obviously, it’s made up of a collection of balls that are covered in lights.  But it still looks pretty cool.

When I took this picture it was pretty dark.  But as I put the camera on a tripod and took the picture with a long exposure, the sky looked quite light and you can easily see the blue color.  Having said that of course the needle is nicely lit and the water on the road gives some really nice light reflections.  I used a really wide lens on this picture, it was the only way I could get the needle in the picture.  But lenses this wide introduce some distortion.  You can remove this but you lose some of the picture.  In this image the tree in the fountain appears to be leaning over to the left, but really it was standing straight up but as I wanted to keep all the details in the image I decided not to correct it.

Today Master Chief showed Carter his new Santa Hat – really nice!

KeyArena – Seattle

17. December 2012 · Comments Off on KeyArena – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

Today I was pretty angry.  I’m sitting at my desk at work and I looked out my window and saw a beautiful afternoon.  Yes it was cold, but dry with a blue sky!  If you saw the state I was in yesterday after my photo trip out, you’d understand my frustration.  I was so wet it was ridiculous!  Yet one day later when I’m stuck at work, it’s a lovely day outside – it’s just not fair.  It’s kind’a hard to really show you how wet it was as I can’t really take nice pictures of rain, so you are just going to trust me that it was miserable.

Anyway, while out I walked around Seattle Center and found myself by KeyArena.  This is a large general purpose arena in Seattle and was the original home of the 1962 world fair (when the space needle was first opened).  It used to be the home of the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team but we sold them to Oklahoma City back in 2008.  Since then the arena is the home of concerts, visiting circuses, ice shows and professional wrestling.  It seats just over seventeen thousand people and this year it was the location for the Microsoft company meeting.

Outside KeyArena is this huge fountain.  In summer it’s literally full of kids running and playing in the water, but yesterday there was nobody there.  But surprisingly the fountain was on. So I walked out to the fountain (in the pouring rain), set up the tripod and grabbed the shot below.  People were running past me in the rain giving me funny looks.  One guy asked me if I got a nice picture but I was pretty much left alone.

I decided last night that I don’t care how bad my pictures are for the rest of the year, I’m NOT going out in the rain again.  Just saying…

Last night Lisa made burgers for dinner and after doing the dished James left the griddle and press out.  When I got home I found this sight!  Not sure why this happened but Master Chief and Carter were trying to “Press” Red.

Baubles – Seattle

16. December 2012 · Comments Off on Baubles – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: ,

Once again the weather was terrible today, but I needed to go out and figured it will probably stop by the time I get to Seattle if I drove there!  I also asked myself how wet could I get?  Well I was totally wrong on the rain stopping, and I found out that you can get VERY wet, walking around in heavy rain with a camera (duh)!

I drove to Seattle Center (by the Space Needle) as I’d heard they had a lot of holiday lights up there and I thought it might make a nice picture.  As my goal was to take pictures of the holiday lights, I needed to get there late in the day, so I left home at 2:30 in the afternoon and drove into the city.  This week parking was no problem, but if you saw the rain coming down you’d realize why.  Nobody was going to go to the Space Needle in this weather, apart from me that is.  I parked across the road from the Needle in the Komo4 TV car park and walked over (in the rain) to see what I could get.

One of the benefits of rain is that you can get some really nice reflection pictures in puddles, but you need the rain to stop!  If not, you just get blurry water which doesn’t look any good.  So that was out!  But despite all my complaining, I did get some nice pictures, and for a change, Lisa picked the first one I’m posting.

Outside the Space Needle is this circular drive with a small fountain in the middle.  By the Needle is a pickup spot where you can drive up and drop off or pick people up.  It’s also where you leave your car if you are valet parking.  Well this area is covered.  No walls but a roof that covers around 100 feet of sidewalk.  Hanging from the roof were these lit up baubles (the only thing I can think of calling them).  They were really pretty and there were loads of them.

This is my first picture.  I could stand under cover and shoot over the heads of people waiting and still get a great shot.  It was pretty windy though and the balls were swinging a little in the wind.  So I had to bump up my ISO so I could get a fast shutter speed to “freeze” the motion.  When I got home I found the images had a little noise but removed that pretty easily in Photoshop.  Other than that, this is exactly what I saw.  Hope you like this one, we do at home.

You can’t get the the end of December without trying to make a ginger bread house!  While this one isn’t made out of ginger bread it’s pretty close.

Outside Workshop – Seattle

14. December 2012 · Comments Off on Outside Workshop – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

It’s weekend time again folks so tomorrow I’m off out to get some new pictures.  But for tonight we have another shot from the Center for Wooden Boats.  If you go there you can sign up for a workshop and learn how to fix your own wooden boat.  If you attend a class, this is where you go.

They have this shed area where you have the lessons and stay undercover when you do – what ever you do when you fix boats.  I took this shot as it was quite dark under the roof and I wanted to see if I could get the interior to come out.  This picture was heavily processed but it was only one shot.  I managed to bring out the shadows in the ceiling and still now blow out the outside.

I really liked visiting this place it was pretty cool.  If I wasn’t completely allergic to exercise I might even be tempted to take a row boat out, but lets not go nuts!

Tonight the guys decided that one of them should sit at the top of a tree.  They rock, paper, scissor’d for it and Red won.

Another Boat – Seattle

13. December 2012 · Comments Off on Another Boat – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I really hope you like boats, as I still have some more to post.  One of the challenges around this “post a picture a day” resolution is that I visit somewhere, take a load of pics, and then don’t go out again until all the pictures are posted.  So you tend to get all the images from one location together.  What I should have done, is visited a few places and rotated images from each location, so it’s not so boring.  Maybe next time I do this I’ll try that.  WHAT AM I SAYING – I’m never doing this again and only have 18 days left – I’m SOOOOO excited.

OK, so about the image.  I was at the Center for Wooden Boats (obviously) and saw this boat mored against the jetty.  What caught my eye was the reflection in the water.  It was so clear (almost like a mirror) that I couldn’t take the shot quick enough.  I also loved the fact that the colors appeared so well in the water.  You can see the blue sky and blue and yellow flags and white posts.

I composed this so that there was more water than land deliberately, but of course Lisa on seeing this said “but you can’t see the reflected things above”!  I actually liked this composition and had another one where you couldn’t see the real boat at all.  But that just looked like an upside down slightly blurry picture so I didn’t select that one for posting.

Anyway, if you get the chance to visit the The Center for Wooden Boats I really recommend it.

Master Chief decided to visit Carter’s new house today, it’s very cool and rather festive!

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