Not a great day today.  I drove to Seattle to get some nice sunset shots but when I arrived in downtown the sky opened and it REALLY started to rain.  I mean really heavy.  I drove around for 30 minutes hoping it would ease up but it actually got worse, so in the end I came home.

As a result tonights image is from my backlog.  I haven’t posted a picture from the Museum of Flight in a while so I thought I’d grab one of those.  This is the SR-71 Blackbird “Spy Plane”.  When you go to the Museum of Flight (something you should definitely do if you get the chance), you’ll see a number of exhibit areas.  The largest area is filled with around 50 planes either around the floor or hanging from the ceiling.

The Blackbird takes center stage and is the main exhibit in the middle of the room.  You can walk all round the plane (and underneath it too) and it’s pretty impressive.  When I was driving to the museum, this is the image I was going to get, I knew exactly what I wanted and pretty much got the shot.  I took another one of the plane from the rear looking underneath and that’s a cool one too, I’ll probably post that in the future.

I think Carter was getting bored or something, tonight he decided to play with Hello Kitty.

Tonight I thought I’d do something completely different.  I’ve taken loads of landscape shots lately and felt like a change.  Just over a year ago I saw someone produce some great smoke sculptures and I thought I’d give it a go.  Basically you set up a black background, fire a flash up into the air and in front of the flash light some incense.

You then start taking pictures of the backlit incense smoke.  When you have a few images you pull them all into photoshop and create a picture from lots of “interesting” shapes.  You can really go wild and make anything you want.  For my first attempt I thought I’d try a sea horse (the shapes I was pulling in helped).

When you’re done, you can add a color cast using photoshop blend modes. It’s actually a lot of fun and I’ll definitely do it again and I guess the beauty of this is every time you do it you get a completely unique image.

I appreciate that this is completely fake and a composited image, but you need a camera to do this so I class this as photography.

Anyway here is my first attempt.

I think the Halo guys are getting board, we left them in the kitchen and came back to find them “playing” with utensils!

There’s kind of a golden rule in photography; when you get the camera out look EVERYWHERE.  Look up, down, both sides, in front and behind.  Don’t just see one opportunity and shoot that.  So that’s the goal, truth is though, like most people once I get an idea I kind of get caught up in that one thing.  I always think after “oh I should have looked around, or tried something different”.  Trouble is I kind of get this revelation on my way home!

Anyway I was in Alki and standing on the pier taking shots of downtown Seattle across Elliot Bay.  For once I thought, what if I shoot over here instead?  The picture below is the result, I have Elliot Bay behind me and not in the picture at all, instead I’m shooting into land.

There was actually a huge trash can on left under the pier light and I pulled that out of the way before taking the picture (I’m so pleased I thought of that too as it would have been a pain to remove in post).

When I got home I was really pleased with the image and like the look of the light on the pier and the way the pier draws your eye back to the shops and apartments on the water front.  The sky has a stormy look about it as well that adds to the picture.

So I get home tonight and to my surprise I find the Halo guys photocopying their butts on my scanner!  This is ridiculous, I mean it’s not a Christmas party or anything like that and both of them were sober!

So normally my primary image is an attempt at a serious picture, but for a change I’m swapping things round (just for today).  My lead image is a Halo picture.  I wanted to do something “special” for Valentine’s Day, something fun, something  romantic, something RED.

So I thought, what represents love and Valentine’s Day?  Immediately I thought of roses and immediately after that I thought of American Beauty.  You know the scene, Mena Suvari lying naked on a bed of rose petals (I think that’s the image – I can’t really remember).  This was the inspiration I needed.  I ran out and brought some red roses (which are pretty abundant at the moment), got home and cut their heads off.

We made a bed of petals and posed our Halo hero.  The resultant picture is below – and I’m really pleased with it.

Happy Valentines Day.

My secondary image was taken at Kirkland waterfront (by Marina Park).  They have this massive gazebo there, I have no idea what it’s there for or who uses it, but I thought it might make an interesting image.

I’ve mentioned before that we have around 16 miles of nature trails around our neighborhood and for a change I went for a walk with the camera down one of the trails.  On my travels I found this green post with a red wheel in the middle of nowhere!  I have no idea what it does but I thought I’d try a picture with the wheel as the subject and the trail behind.

Some people will tell you that when they take a picture they know exactly what they are trying to capture – they can “see” the finished image before they take the shot.  Now that does happen sometimes but really it’s pretty rare.  For me I see something interesting, and try “working the scene”.  I may spend 10-20 minutes trying different angles and perspectives (this is why Lisa NEVER goes out with me when I photograph – it drives her mad!)  So here I was out by the wheel.  No idea if this would look interesting and I took several different shots.  Some wide, some close, some with everything in focus and some with the wheel in focus and some with it out of focus (you get the idea).

Now the back of the camera is a little 3″ screen and while you can check it out to see if there are any major issues (out of focus, bad composition) you can’t really tell if you’ve got a good picture until you get the shot on a computer screen.

When I got home I found the image below and it kind of grabbed me.  But in honesty I don’t know why I like it.  Maybe it’s the red wheel against the green background or the weathered look of the metal – I don’t know.  Interestingly Lisa said the same thing, so tonight this is the image I’m posting.

With Valentines day coming up tomorrow, our Halo dudes are feeling a little romantic.