Every Saturday through Summer Redmond hosts a car show for classic and exotic cars.  I say every Saturday, if it’s raining they cancel, but in July and August it’s pretty much guaranteed to be on.

I’ve gone down there a few times to take pictures and after a while it gets hard to shoot a car in a new or interesting way.  What made today more challenging was that it was overcast, with no blue sky at all – still lovely and warm but no direct sunlight.  So getting low and shooting up (which is the view I usually like to do) captured a nice car with a really boring sky.  Also a problem was the number of people there.  I got to the shot at 8:30 but it was still packed and there’s nothing worse that a nice car with loads of people standing round it.

So today I tried something a little different.  Sure I took a couple of “complete” car shots but most of the pictures I captured were close ups of parts of cars.  This was actually a lot of fun – although people watching thought I was nuts!

Hope you like the Images.

So week 6 was street photography which is a genre of photography I’m not too familiar with.  The idea goes like this.  You go out into the street with your camera and shoot people doing interesting “stuff” hopefully showing real emotions or caught in great compositions without them knowing.  That last bit is the challenge “WITHOUT THEM KNOWING”.  Those of you who know me well know I’m not that inconspicuous.  I kind of stand out – quite a lot.  I’m clumsy, loud and not the kind of guy who can do this without being seen.

But I figured, what the heck, I’ll give it a go. So out I went with the camera to see what I could shoot.

So guess how many times I was caught taking a sneaky picture?  That’s right – EVERYTIME.  Apparently having me standing in front of you with a camera in my hand and my tongue sticking out is a bit obvious.

That said I quite enjoyed the process, it can be a little voyeuristic, you sitting on a bench waiting for someone to do something “interesting”. When I got home I also found I had an excessively large number of pictures of young women (they were over 21 – I’m not that bad).  Very few dudes 🙂  I also had a lot of shots of people staring directly at me with a “Get Lost Creep” look on their face – but that’s normal.

Some street photographers find a great background with good light, and just sit there waiting for the right subject to come along – I’d suck at this, it’s too much like nature photography for me, sitting by a hole in the ground for hours.  Others stop passers by with “interesting looks or faces” and ask if they can take their portrait.  This I think I could do, once I got over the embarrassment.

Anyway after an afternoon in the mall I got a few pics I liked, and this one was one of my favorites.  It would have been better if she was closer to the guy, but she didn’t want to look at him or acknowledge he was there, and I thought that was funny.

I’ve been on vacation to Hawaii a few times now, it’s one of the real benefits of living in the Pacific North West as the islands are only about a 5 hour flight away.  If you’ve never been you probably have a romantic view of what it’s like.  Maybe you’ve see Hawaii five 0 (the new series or if you’re old like me the old one with Jack Lord).  Perhaps you even remember Magnum PI with Tom Selleck (as a kid I loved that show – talk about a man crush!)  Either way let me tell you this, Hawaii is everything you ever dreamed… only better!

It truly is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, the beaches are just stunning, the scenery is amazing and totally exotic and if you want to relax, it’s the only place on earth to go.  At least that’s what I thought!

We’ve been to Maui a couple of times, Kauai once, and this year we went to Oahu.

People at work who haven’t been to Hawaii asked me how the islands differed.  The easiest way I could come up with to explain the difference was as follows.  Kauai is a small village with a couple of shops, if you like big malls or crowded places Kauai is not the place for you, but if you want total piece and quiet, it’s heaven.  Maui is a small town, nice shops, good restaurants (all your favorites) a little touristy with lots to see.  On Maui you can lie on a beach in the morning and shop in Tiffany’s in the afternoon (been there done that).  Then we get to Oahu.  For me this was a big city to Maui’s town or Kauai’s village.  Oahu has it all going on, mad busy beaches, big cities, HUGE shopping complexes, a massive navel base and traffic like Seattle in rush hour.

If you like the beauty of Hawaii but need the hustle and bustle of home Oahu is for you – it’s just not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really pleased we went but I want to go to Hawaii to relax, not sit in traffic for 90 minutes after going to one of the biggest open air malls I’ve ever been to get back to my hotel.  While there we stayed in Aulani the Disney Hotel and complex in Hawaii.  This is a place where you need to take a LOAD of money as it was the most expensive hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  Now I like Disney as while it’s pricy you get value for money, but the food in Aulani was just terrible but still SUPER expensive and as they have you as a captive audience on the west coast, you kind of have to eat there!

Anyway, Oahu it was this year.  Issues aside we had a wonderful vacation, the pools and facilities in the hotel were really nice and the kids had a blast.  While there I took a few pictures 🙂 and really enjoyed visiting Peal Harbor and walking on the Missouri (that’s history for you right there!)

Will I go back to Hawaii again? No question a huge YES.  Oahu though? Probably not.

Here’s a selection of some of my favorite pictures.

Week 5 hit while we were on vacation in Hawaii.  The theme for this week was “Lights”.  One of the fun parts about this weekly photo shoot is that it’s all about interpretation – I’m allowed to do anything I like that say’s “Lights” to me.  (My game my rules :-).

When I travel I do tend to take quite a lot of gear with me but I don’t normally take any lights.  This time however I had a single speedlight with an umbrella.  While talking to Abi one afternoon we thought it would be fun to take a picture of her flicking her wet hair back.  I figured to do this I’d need a light to freeze the motion and get that perfect picture.  So just after the sun set we walked down to the hotel pools to see if there were any empty ones that would allow us to make a picture.

Unbelievably the infinity pool was empty so we ran to that and Abi jumped in.

I put the Umbrella and speedlight on the end of a mono pod and asked Lisa to hold the light pointing at Abi.

Before Abi started to flick the hair I needed to get the lighting right, so we took 5 pictures getting the right exposure and light power.  Once done, she started to “perform”.  Amazingly it took less than 10 attempts to get this shot.  So from start to finish it was 14 photographs.

I have to say I knew what we were trying to do but didn’t think the image would come out like this, both Abi and I were delighted and celebrated the shot by swimming in the pool together for the next half hour.

Hope you like the shot too.

Week 4 is here and the subject/topic is Landscape.  (I guess we weren’t very imaginative this week).  Anyway Lisa was out for the day so Abi and I hit the road.  We decided to head for Marymoor Park and see what we could find.  We walked down to the Sammamish Lake water front and took some shots there, then we walked over the this huge windmill and shot some of that, next we headed over to this old building that’s used as the Marymoor’s offices and shot that.

All the images were nice but none of them really grabbed me.  We were going to head home and we noticed that the sun going down over Redmond made the sky look amazing.  But where to shoot it!

So Abi and I started driving around looking for something to be in the foreground of the sky and sunset.  Then we passed the sports fields.  Wimbledon was currently on and the tennis courts were empty so I thought I’d try there.

We set up and immediately I knew I had a great shot.  We stayed there for another 20 minutes and I took loads of shots of the sunset.  The picture below was my favorite and I’m really pleased with the end result.