A few days after our Seattle visit we decided to go back. We thought it would be fun to watch the sun set over the city from the Columbia Tower.

The Columbia Tower is the tallest building in the city and is 943 feet high. It was build back in 2007 and cost a whopping $200 million. The tower has 76 floors and the story goes that the Architect (Chester Lindsey) wanted 76 to celebrate his fathers 76th birthday. However the height of the building was going to be too high and violated Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules as the building was under the approach flight path to SeaTac airport.

So Chester solved the problem by dropping the height of each floor by 2 inches, just getting under the approved height!

I have no idea if this is true but it’s a great story 🙂

Anyway the 73rd floor has a “Sky View Observatory” that costs $12 to visit and it gives you a panoramic view of the city.

We got to the tower about 8:30 (sun was supposed to set at 9pm) and I checked out the views.

My idea was to set the camera up on a tripod and start taking pictures as the sun was going down, and keep going until well after it had set and the city lights had come on.

For this shoot I had my 10-24mm ultra wide set to f/11 – that way I’d get everything in focus.

After walking round the building a couple of times I picked my spot shooting directly into the sun over the Olympics with the City (and Space Needle) in my foreground.

I put the camera on the Tripod, connected the shutter release cable and started taking pictures.

Now I should point out that I had my wife, two kids and father in-law (with his wife) with me. – I really should have thought this though, as by 9pm as the sun was going down they were all getting board!

So I had to keep apologizing as I wasn’t going anywhere for another half hour – at least!

So I just kept going.

I had a couple of close issues, my battery ran out at about ten past nine, so I had to change that without moving the camera, and a load of people kept coming by and got way too close to the setup.

Anyway by 9:30, my son came and told me that if I wanted to live I needed to pack up NOW – Lisa was not happy.

So I grabbed everything and we left with me hoping I had enough.

When we got home I started processing.

What I wanted was the sun going down over the mountains with a nice amount of light over the water, but with the city lights on. Obviously this is an impossible image as you can’t see both at the same time.

So it was clearly time for Photoshop magic.

In the end I picked two images. One at around 8:50 with the sun really low in the sky, and the other was the last one I took at 9:30.

I added some adjustments in Lightroom to both pictures to get a great sky and backdrop in one and a great city in the other, and then manually blended them together with layers and an overlay mask.

The end result is the image below.

OK, so this isn’t real, it’s art, but so is EVERY OTHER PICTURE like this you have ever seen 🙂 This is just my version.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to my blog – I know I’m a bad photographer 🙁 The reality is work has been rather busy so I’ve spent a lot of time there and when I get home I’m just too tired to spend time writing up my day, plus my days just aren’t that interesting.

But I have been out and about with the camera, arguably not as much as I’d like but I do find time. So I thought I’d spend some time today doing some catching up – post some older entries with some pictures.

This posting is all about the Washington Skagit Valley Tulip festival. This takes place every year in April and May and is well worth going to.

They have fields and fields of tulips in full bloom and it’s beautiful.

Now I’ve been going for a few years now and have a few posts in this blog on my visits and I’m sure many of the pictures look the same (I mean how many different ways are there to shoot a Tulip?)

That said I took the camera and got some nice shots so thought I’d share. What was different this year though was that I leant Abi (my daughter) a camera and she took some pictures too.

After a first few shots I told her to come up with some interesting compositions as all her shots were from above looking down – basically what you would see if you went there and walked around. I showed her how I got down really low and also how tilting the camera (or just shooting up) can give a different perspective.

Well after that she went nuts! She was lying in the mud, turning the camera upside down and really coming up with some amazing shots. At the end of the day I learnt a few things from her 🙂

Unfortunately I don’t have her images to share, they are on her computer (probably just as well as some of her’s are more interesting than mine lol) but I think she has a talent here that I’ll continue to encourage.

Anyway, enjoy the images.

This weekend Lisa and Abi were out of town attending a gymnastics meet in Bellingham.  So I was left at home alone all day Saturday and most of Sunday.  Now I say alone, but that’s not really true as James was home too, but he lives in his room on his computer and I didn’t see him all weekend so I was basically alone.

So what to do?  One thing I did find out is that I suck without Lisa – it appears (don’t tell her this) that having her here telling me what to do all day actually keeps me busy.  Here I was, on my own, the whole weekend to myself and I didn’t know what to do.  Talk about “Trained”.

By Sunday afternoon I was literally going nuts – bored stupid.  So I’m on the internet reading one of my favorite Fuji camera sites http://www.fujix-forum.com and came across a post I found interesting.

The post was basically discussing the value of camera sensor size and whether a full frame sensor was that much better than a Fuji APS-C sensor (I told you I was bored).  Now I don’t expect you to understand any of this but I’ll tell you that the Fuji sensors are a little smaller than some professional high end digital cameras from Nikon and Canon (that’s all you really need to know).  Now I used to have one of those expensive high end larger sensor cameras and sold it to buy the Fuji gear I have to day.  I love my fuji cameras and think they are just as good as any Nikon or Canon.

The article was basically saying that with my camera when you take a portrait shot, you don’t get the “soft – out of focus” look the professionals like.  (This is called Bokeh.)  I don’t agree and have achieved this MANY times.  So I decided to do a test to show you can get nice bokeh in your pics.

But what to shoot?

As everyone was out I decided to try a self-portrait.  Now I should point out here that one of the reasons I take all the pictures in my family is that I don’t like having my picture taken.  So this was going to be “fun”.

So I got out my tripod, one of my nice portrait lenses, one light and a small soft box.  I set it all up in the dining room and got out my phone.  Yes that’s right, I got my phone which has an app that talks to my camera.  Using my phone I could stand in front of the camera, see on the phone what the camera was looking at, focus on the phone, look up and take the shot!  Cool eh?

This is basically what I did.  Of course I had to do it probably 30 times before I actually got a picture I half liked, but that’s it.  The end result is below and hopefully you can see the nice bokeh (soft focus) behind me in the garden.

Now as my whole family know I live in Photoshop and since I took this shot I’ve been asked several times if I “Photoshopped” the image.  I’m not quite sure what they are actually asking here.  Do they like the image and think I made me look better?  Or do they not like the image and think I should have made myself look better? Who knows.

The answer to the question however is YES.  The image was loaded into Photoshop and I sharpened it and added a vignette to make it look nice.  The rest is (unfortunately) all me.

Now this is a terrible thing to admit but I’m not a huge fan of shooting my kids.  If you need to ask why, you don’t have kids yourself!  Basically most people who ask me to photography them actually want me to do it.  Sure people aren’t necessarily comfortable in front of the camera but they try – and it’s my job of course to help them.

But my kids… they DEFINITELY don’t want to be photographed, in fact they hate it!

So when Lisa asked me to get some shots of James and Abi, with their cousin Regan I thought “oh no” and adopted an unhappy face.

But not to be perturbed I got some lights out and grabbed the camera.  But things were not right – something was wrong!  Abi was in the shower getting ready (this never happens), then James got in the shower!!!!!  Regan put on Seattle Seahawks t-shirt (his new favorite team) and then all got in front of the camera.

Then they smiled – I’ll say that again – THEY SMILED!

So either, I’m getting better at this (unlikely) or they just wanted to play tonight (probable).

Anyway here are the shots.

After our day out in Seattle we visited Kirkland for the evening.  Kirkland has this really nice marina with a small beach on Lake Washington.  When we got there the sun had just gone down but it was still light out.  This is a wonderful time to shoot, it’s usually called the “Blue Hour” and in the images below you can see why.

There’s a boat tour company that runs out of Kirkland called Argosy. They provide trips around Lake Washington and will even take you out to Puget Sound and the San Juan’s.  When I got there, we saw an Argosy dinner cruse that was just about to head out.  So I grabbed some pictures.

Once the boat had gone I shot some images of the piers, which have these lamps on them that cast a great light across the water.  The water was a little choppy so I put the camera on a tripod and shot with a long exposure to smooth the water.

Next it was up past the beach to shoot a huge gazebo that over looks the lake.  This looked great as the blue sky was juxtaposed against the orange gazebo lights.

Finally behind the gazebo there was this statue of six kids running up a hill.  Above the kids the sky was super blue, and at the kids feet the lights from the shops looked fantastic.  With this image there were cars that kept going by that cast a lot of light onto the statues.  This shot didn’t come out as I’d hoped but I still liked it so thought I’d include it too.

Once again, all images shot with a Fujifilm X100T camera with a fixed 23mm f/2 lens.