From Blah to Bling

Hmmm, a day of shooting. Where shall we go?

When I set out for today's "random shoot" I figured it would be a day like my Pike Place day... a familiar locale with the pics of the randomest things. The day turned out to be one with a rather random itinerary. All for the sake of photography.

1st stop

After an uneventful trip to the camera shop, our first destination was Marymore Park in Redmond. It has many trees. It should have "the" tree shot, filled with fall's beautiful colors, right? Well.... it has trees, they are pretty, but at the same time pretty sterile. I did manage a pic of the windmill near the entrance of the park and one of the sunlight hitting a gate near the historic mansion/building. We'll call Marymore the "blah" part of the day.

2nd stop

Then we headed south. We found a place with many trees (bonzai even!) however, it was closed. Huh? It was barely even 4:30pm... we were in Del's old hood so we didn't need garm-garm to find other fun locales. The pic below was taken at the marina in Des Moines. I really, really wanted to get a shot from the base of the fishing poles, but since the fisherpeople were strangers I figured they wouldn't let me. So I settled for breaking one of the rules of photography and shot straight into the sun, just for fun. (oh and um, New Dan, if you are reading this, I hear that this marina is a great place for crabbing...)

3rd stop

It was a pleasant afternoon, but the photo-mojo just wasn't happening. After a bit of Starbucks for inspiration, we were in Seattle. The waterfront is always a good spot and is especially lovely at night. See ?

"aquarium" because it is the aquarium

p.s. Look! You can see the space needle in the background. Yeah, it was intentional.

"aquarium 2" this one has a bit 'o dock, too

For these two (the ones above and below) I stood in the same place and experimented framing the shot with my camera tilted down and straight-on... I learned on the Rainier lesson with Randal that you can get more depth of field by tilting the camera down. Can you tell which one is which? You can't judge by the reflections in the water because I used different shutter speeds for both of them. oooo tricky ;)

As you can see, the waterfront was the "bling" part of the day.

"Ivar's sign" pretty self explanatory, but the neat thing about this shot is that it is intentially under exposed AND hand held.

Um, very bling. (yep, I used a star filter...)

There you go! Another round of pictures. I really like the night-time shots; they are so sparkly. (I am pretty sure Ansel would have used the term "sparkly"... right?) Thank you for looking at my pictures!