So once again I took my camera out at lunch and went for a walk.  I had no idea what I was looking for but I needed a picture for tonight’s posting.  I didn’t take the car so this really was a photo-walk and I should point out I work on Microsoft’s west campus, so it’s pretty much all office buildings and gardens.

We have a few (really) nice cafeteria’s (they’re full on restaurants really I guess) and I thought maybe I could photograph some food.  But in truth I didn’t really want to walk into a restaurant and pull out my camera and have a hundred people stare at me.

Outside the restaurants were groups of people sitting around at tables having lunch and again I thought of a street photography type of shot, imagine the outside of a small bistro in a city.  But again I didn’t think that would go down well – some of those Microsofties can be a little difficult.

So it was back to the gardens.  There were a few flower beds, and a large number of grasses.  I tried photographing the grasses from inside the bushes but it looked terrible (well you gotta try).  Then I found these yellow flowers.  I thought they looked daisy-ish (again like yesterday’s purple flowers), but I looked up daisy’s on the internet and these aren’t daisy’s.

I took loads of pictures of these flowers, from all angles.  Because the petals were so yellow I found that pictures from above just came across as a sea of yellow.  I tried shooting the flowers from below so I had yellow petals against a blue sky, but the underside of the flowers just didn’t look that good so that didn’t work either.  In the end I found the composition below, one flower standing tall above the others against a green backdrop.

I really liked the shallow depth of field I got in this picture, the way some of the petals on the primary subject are out of focus and the center of the flower is sharp worked really well.  Hope you like it too.

Today the Halo dudes decided to volunteer at the local elementary school, I’m not sure what they plan to do but they seemed very excited.

I don’t know about you but I’m not really a fan of insect pictures.  Why is that I hear you ask?  Well firstly they are really hard to get, those little dudes don’t stand still and getting them in focus is a total bitch.  You stand there like an idiot, the “bug” moves to the right point and you focus, and he’s gone!  And there is nothing worse than an out of focus insect – horrible.

Then there is the subject matter, have you seen insects blown up big in a picture?  They are major disgusting, all hair and eyes <insert you own great joke here about hot girls walking into a Hell’s Angels bar…>.  Bottom line is there is nothing worse than an in focus insect – horrible.

So what the heck did I post my bee picture below for?

Well here’s the thing.  I don’t have any pictures in my back log that I like.  Work right now is very very busy – I can’t tell you why as it’s all top secret and I’d have to kill you etc., so when I do get some time off I’m too exhausted to actually go out with the camera.

So I had this idea.  If I walk around with my camera everywhere I go, I’m bound to see something interesting that I can shoot.  Guess what?  I don’t see anything!  Either all the fun stuff is happening around the corner or I live in the most boring city in North America (quite possible by the way).

Anyway (I’m starting to ramble), I walked over to one of our big cafeteria’s this afternoon to get some lunch and walked past these – I’m gonna call them flowers as there was no sign telling me what they are (they look daisy’ish to me), and I thought, ooooh purple flowers.  I grabbed the camera and started shooting.

Then along comes this bee and I go, ooooh bee, and start shooting that.  When I get back to my desk I looked at the images and I thought this one looked quite nice (for a dirty great big insect anyway).  The quite nice bit is the purple flower, the ooooh that’s the interesting bit is supposed to be the bee.

Trust me when I say this is a better picture than the 120 I have in my back log hence it gets posted tonight.  Hope you don’t get creeped out by the scary insect.

Master Chief’s sweet tooth got him in trouble today, and Cater wouldn’t help him out!

I got home from work a little late this evening and looked through my backlog of images and came to the conclusion I didn’t like any of them.  This happens quite a lot.  I take a load of pictures, post the one I like best and hold onto others that I think have potential for the future.  Then later I go back and look at them and think yuk!

So I had a problem, I needed a picture to post tonight, didn’t have one and it was late and sucky outside (weather wise – plus I really didn’t want to go out to shoot, too tired) so I needed an idea.

To try something different I thought I’d try to be a little creative so I got a white cup and some Crayola crayons.  Put the crayons in the cup and took a picture from above and lit the crayons with a ring flash.  This was pretty easy to do and the image I’m posting tonight was my third attempt.

As the kids are going back to school soon school supplies are everywhere, so having crayon’s around was no problem.  I guess this is my attempt at being arty.

Tonight the guys decided to test out the new printer, they did quite well I think.

Abi and I were driving along Lake Washington Boulevard right by the lake looking for something to shoot.  We were in a pretty expensive area on the western shore driving through Coleman Park when I found the perfect subject.  We drove under the I90 Lake Washington Bridge and I thought it would make a great picture.

So we parked up right outside a waterfront house that was two houses away from these bridges.  I mention this as the house was for sale and while it was really beautiful, it was pretty much under these bridges.  And the cost… 2.2 million dollars.  So you have to ask yourself, how much does one cost that’s not next to huge bridges like these?

Anyway, Abi and I grabbed the tripod and ran past the houses and down a small embankment to the waters edge.  Set up the tripod and captured the image below.  Looking through the view finder I knew this was going to be a nice image, but even I was blown away when I got home and processed the shot.

Some of my images are nice I think, but this one made me gasp!  Lisa and the kids felt the same so I’m betting everyone else hates it – haha you never can win.  As the sun was going down, you can see the red glow of the sunset on the other side of the lake, the underside of the bridges were really dark.  So this is actually a seven image HDR picture.

The land you can see at the end of the bridge is actually Mercer Island in the middle of Lake Washington.  Over to the left on the other side of the lake you can make out some sky scrapers.  This is the city of Bellevue.  The colors in this image came out really well, with the sun hitting Mercer and the blue sky, and the light on the water, this could be one of my favorite pictures of the year.

Master Chief wanted to have a go at escapeology, but found he sucked at that and Carter had to help him get out.

A friend at home (Kathryn Skinner) asked me if I had any nice black and white images, so we looked though my image collection and both decided I didn’t.  As a result I thought I’d try to capture a picture that would make a good black and white.  So this evening Abi and I went out to see what we could get.

We found ourselves over on the west side of Lake Washington down by the I90 bridge and stopped by a small park with a pier.  The sun was starting to set so the pier was no longer directly lit and I thought the dark wood of the pier might look good against the sky.  Ideally I would have been there a little later so I could have taken the picture with a nice long exposure to smooth the water but I had Abi and couldn’t really hang around.

At the end of the pier were three fishermen and under the pier were loads of kids swimming.  Every now and then they would climb up onto the pier and jump off.  I spent some time in Photoshop removing all the people until the image looked as it does below.

I actually had a couple of lenses with me, one of them was my wide angle “landscape” lens, but unfortunately it started capturing images that were way over exposed.  So that’s going back to Nikon tomorrow.  As a result I took the image below with normal zoom, but I think it came out really well.  So I’ll show this to Kathryn and see what she thinks.

Nothing like a nice game of pool, but as there are three colors on the table I have NO IDEA what Carter and Master Chief are playing.