rhythm of peace

One of my favorite places is the butterfly house at the Pacific Science Center. I am always in awe at the abundance of the beautiful winged creatures, and watching them gracefully float through the air reminds of purity of nature's beauty. Despite the crowds & an annoyingly loud staff member, I still found some much needed tranquility with the butterflies on Saturday. As an added bonus, I was able to introduce my place of refuge to my photographic partner in crime.

I usually will go there and enjoy the butterflies; the trip on Saturday was the first time that I brought my dslr with me. (Of course, I do have a set of pics of the Corbinator there that I took with my little canon...) It was a great opportunity to practice manual focus & messing with my aperture settings. I was surprised at how close I could get with my camera, and ended up switching over to my bff the 50mm along with close up filter for some shots. How friggin' cool is that? My friend, the fong puffer, also got quite a bit of use in the buttefly house.

ooo aperture!
These two butteflies perched on the petals were a great study for trying different aperture settings.



take off
I like how the butterfly looks like it is about ready to take off. To inifinity... and beyond!




Up close & upside down
To me, the hour that we spent in the butterfly seemed like five minutes. I could have spent hours there. I haven't really explored the world of insect photography, and am still amazed that these images came out of my camera... how did I get Here?

Editing

I was happy with the "realistic" look of the pictures that I took... I am a big fan of "baby steps" or "small wins" so my heart is content with just being able to get the darned things in focus. The artistic side of me, though, wanted to do at least a *little* bit of editing, so I chose the picture below to work with...

ta-daaaa!

The Rhythm

You know what.... the Seattle Center in general is one of my favorite places. There always seems to be something funky and cultural going on there. Its a weird, but cool kind of vibe. Saturday's event in the Center House was the World Rhythm Festival. What a lovely surprise... we had ventured into the Center House in search of rest & caffeination and walked right into the pulse of a thousand drummers. Okokok, it probably wasn't a thousand, but dang, there were a ton of people.

see?

I wanted to capture the movement of the moment & took a picture of a lady near me as she was hitting her piece of percussion. I didn't have the greatest vantage point, so I cropped in to get rid of the clutter and added some noise, just for fun. I can't believe that I just added noise.

And here we are at the end of pics. Thank you very much for stopping by & checking things out. You Stay Classy... Planet Earth.