For those who don’t know, I’ve played the guitar since I was nine years old.  Throughout my life I’ve had times when I’ve played and times when I haven’t.  Right now I’m in a “dry spell” probably because of my photography hobby.

However a couple of years ago I was all about the guitar, I even got hold of a 1952 telecaster (it’s an absolute beauty).  Anyway Lisa was walking through Target around Christmas and saw an electric guitar with a Union Jack body and she brought it for me.  I have a few guitars now (five in total) and hang them on the wall in my den and Lisa thought the flag guitar would look great in my collection.  And it does.

So for tonight’s picture I thought I’d photograph the guitar.

Now at first I placed the guitar on a table, got out some lights and started shooting.  The images were horrible.  Every one was either heavily over exposed or just looked plain bad!  I was getting really frustrated and got a whole new appreciation for photographers who take product shots.

Then I got an idea.  Light painting!

Light painting involves turning off all the lights in the house and setting a long exposure on the camera (something like 30 seconds).  Then you take a picture of a subject and make sure that the image is totally black.  Then you get a flashlight and take another shot, this time shining the flashlight on the subject.  You get to wave the light around for the 30 second exposure and light the subject however you like.

This definitely takes practice and you have to go through the process of shooting an image, looking at areas that are too dark or too light, and then trying again.  I had to shoot the image of the guitar several times and every time got a different image (each one slightly better).

In the end I got a shot I really liked.  So for the rest of this week I’m going to be taking light painting pictures.  Let’s see how things work out.

We are still in “Girl Scout cookie week” so it wasn’t a surprise to find Carter and Master Chief tonight playing Cookie Tic-Tac-Toe.

Late posting today but I just made it (by 12 minutes).  Lisa and Abi went out this eventing to see a friend complete in the Miss Seattle Pageant and James and I were left at home.  I figured if the girls can go out and have some fun, then the boys can too.  So James and I jumped in the car and went to Seattle.  I grabbed the picture below and we went for dinner at the Metropolitan – fantastic steak if you ever get the chance.

This shot is taken overlooking downtown Seattle in a rather “dodgy” area.  James and I forced marched from a car park to the spot where I took the shot, took the picture real quick and ran back to the car – how sad is that!  Anyway it came out ok (especially as it was a rush job).

On the way home we drove past Pike Place Market and it was all lit up, I’m definitely going back to catch a night shot of that.  Anyway here is todays picture.

Carter found some bubbles tonight and I caught him playing with them, here is the shot.

After a few days of portraits I thought I’d go back to landscapes today.  This picture was taken in Carnation looking east towards the Cascade mountain range.  I liked this image mainly because of the sky, which is odd when you have the mountains center picture.

Coming from the UK (and London at that) I never saw landscapes like this, the tallest thing near where I come from is the Canary Wharf building in the city.  We had no mountains, in fact the tallest “mountain” in England is in the Lake District and it’s a sad 3200 feet!  90 miles from where we live here in Washington is Mount Rainier, that’s 14,400 feet.

The best bit is in the morning when I drive to work I get a fantastic view of Rainier.  On the way home I see the snow capped Cascades in the distance.  Pretty good for a London boy.

Now here is a blast from the past.  I wonder how many people viewing this post actually owned a Stylophone!  I had one, and so did David Bowie – just listen to Space Oddity.  Anyway, Carter found mine and started to blast out some awesome tunes.

Tonight is the last of the family portraits (for the time being anyway).  Lisa actually allowed me to take her picture.  This doesn’t happen very often so I should really enjoy the moment.  As with James and Abi the goal was to capture Lisa doing what she does every night, and I think I nailed it!  Lisa didn’t want an iPad when they came out, but I convinced her to try one and once she did she wouldn’t put it down.  Now she lies of the sofa and plays “games” on her iPad – for hours!  She pretends to be watching TV but really she’s playing her games, I even have to tell her when to look up when something interesting happens.

I wanted to do a black and white again, but Lisa insisted that I leave her bow on her slippers pink.  No idea why you will have to ask her.

Big game of tug-a-war tonight, three Master Chief’s against smaller weaker halo characters.  Guess who won?

So yesterday I started shooting environmental portraits of the family.  I started with James on his Xbox, and tonight we have Abi reading.  Now Abi is a very keen gymnast and is usually flipping or cartwheeling around the house/garden/sofa etc., and my immediate thought was to capture her doing her gymnastics thing.

But I walked into the family room and found her literally in this pose reading on the sofa.  I loved the pose so much I grabbed the camera and took the shot.

Of course the moment I pointed the camera in her direction she started to pose for me and I had to ask her to just pretend I wasn’t there.  After a couple of shots she stopped smiling and I got the image below.

So that’s two for two, tomorrow night is the Lisa picture – if I can just convince her to let me that is.

This evening the Halo guys decided they wanted to play connect four.  So out came the game and the competition started.