Today’s image was taken in La Conner which sits on the Swinomish Channel.  This large channel separates the Swinomish Indian Reservation from the Skagit Valley mainland.  There are only two bridges that cross the channel, the picture below shows one of them, this is called locally the Rainbow Bridge.

The Channel is pretty wide and while I was taking this picture seals kept popping up to the surface.  Obviously the moment I tried to take a picture they would dive under – question is how do they know I’m trying to photograph them?

The city of La Conner is not very big, it has less than 1000 residents and based on the number of restaurants and gift type shops I would guess one of their main industries in tourism.  While there I had an excellent pint in a local pub with a really nice pizza to go with it.

Something else I thought I’d mention in this posting is that just over nine years ago I moved to the US from England.  To keep my family and friends back in the UK up to date with our activities I created a web site.  On that web site I placed a visitor counter.  Nine years later I have 6,599 visits.  Now by contrast I set up this site back in January (3 1/2 months ago) and I now have 6,672 visits!  Clearly my family site sucks!  So I’ll be shutting that down soon (mind you posting every day definitely helps, the last time I updated the family site was in April 2010).

The Halo guys went to play in the neighborhood park today and found a climbing wall.  Not being guys who turn down a challenge, they went for it.

When I was in Rosario Beach I walked past this picnic shelter.  The tour guide suggested taking a shot through the window turning the window into a frame for the beach outside.  I actually tried this but wasn’t overly pleased with the end result.  But before I left I thought I’d try one last picture.

The building was made up of large wooden logs and there was a rustic slightly weathered look to the interior.  There was a lot of sunlight streaming in the the window and a stone floor and fireplace.  I figured it would make a good HDR image as it was really dark in the roof and corners and very light by the windows.

So I placed my camera on it’s tripod and took the shot below 5 times and used Photomatix to create the end result.  The completed image captured the wood grain and color really well.  Fortunately everyone else had just left the building so I didn’t have to remove anyone in post processing.

The Halo guys found some sand and a digger and decided to try some construction.

This is the last Daffodil image I will post from my Mount Vernon trip – I promise.  This picture was the last one I took that day, we had just left a winery and were on our way to an ice cream store.  We stopped by some amazing yellow fields and I captured this image.

There were quite a few people there taking pictures so by getting really low and shooting up, I managed to get a clean shot of just the flowers.  So this is a rather simple image but the deep blue sky and yellow flower work very well together.

I was thinking of going back to the tulip festival again this weekend but Abi wasn’t too well so we decided to stay at home.  Needless to say I need to go next week or I will miss the festival.  So next Saturday I will either go with the family or head up really early on my own.

The halo guys wanted to get some fresh air outside this evening, Master Chief found a place to stand in the shade but I think it was a bad location.

While visiting Rosario Beach last week I actually went down to the water’s edge to take a picture.  Now this looks like the sea but really it’s Puget Sound, the sea is a bit further out.  But it still looked good.

The thing I liked, that caught my attention were the tide pools.  When I was a kid, my family and I would spend our summer holidays at the beach in the West Country of England in a county called Cornwall.  We went back to the same small village a few times, the place was called Bude.  My mother was evacuated there during the war as London wasn’t safe, so when she had a family she would drag us all there for our summer holidays.

While Bude was a very quaint village, the weather wasn’t always great and I remember many a year sitting on the beach under and umbrella in the rain as my dad said “We’ve come to the beach so we are going to spend the day here” (or something like that).  At the time I was miserable but I do look back with fond memories.  So what’s this got to do with tide pools?

Well one of the main reasons we went back, was that the coast line of Cornwall looked very much like this picture below.  My Mum loved these pools of water and we would lose her for hours when she would go looking for tiny crabs and fish with a little net.  In fact I remember all we could see of her was her bent over with her arse in the air!  Very funny.

Anyway I thought the image below looked really nice and it did remind me of those cold summer vacations as a kid.  Hope you like it too.

We had our first bbq of the year today and the Halo guys offered to help out.  However, height is not their strong point and they didn’t do too well.

So last week Lisa, James, Abi and I went to Carillon Point to see what we could photograph.  It was (as you can see in the picture) a lovely day and many of the boats that are normally moored at the harbor where out on Lake Washington.

Right on the water front at Carillon is the Woodmark Hotel.  This is a really nice place to stay and there is a great story about a film I made at this hotel for a team morale event.  But I’ll have to save that for my memoirs (I’d get in trouble at work if I spilled the beans now), but the hotel is really nice.  So nice in fact that they have their own boat that you can use to ferry you across Lake Washington from Kirkland to Seattle.

As luck would have it we happened to see the boat coming back into dock and the boat is really cool.  It’s covered in polished wood and I checked out what the guy who was driving it was doing after he moored up (do you drive a boat? I don’t know).  He was polishing and cleaning the cabin! Very sad.

Anyway I liked this shot of the boat coming in and thought I’d post it as my picture of the day.

Here you can see how Carter and Master Chief have to rough it when it comes to lunch rations at Microsoft!