Fine Art Photography Blog

Bored one cold, dark night in the upper left corner of our map, I found another use for the fire. Today, the sun went down around 4:30 pm, although the Olympic Mountain Range across the water to the west means we loose sight early. It would be an exaggeration to call us the land of the midnight sun, but it certainly feels like eternal night in the winter here.

We respond by staying indoors, drinking lots of coffee, dressing like Eskimos for the occasional sprint from the door to the car. We find “indoor activities.” We feel like miniature Alaskans, bound to The North not just by our coastal mountains, totem poles, and frontier heritage, but also by our brutal climate. It was against this context that photographing two pennies seemed like a reasonable way to pass time:
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Amgen is a California-based bio engineering firm. Steel beams woven together to form what looks something like DNA. This is clearly a metaphor; the pedestrian bridge over the railway hugging Puget Sound leads to a state of the art research complex. Stylish and substantive, the bridge itself looks as nice as the view it provides:

This is one of my favorite photos.

A bit of luck was involved here; during the two minute exposure on a dark night a train came roaring underneath, burning the image of its headlights into the frame. The intense darkness forces the shutter open for what would normally be an unfathomable amount of time. Seattle’s cloud cover reflects the city light back downward, and given enough time, the wind carries them through the sky, leaving faint blurred traces reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Elliot is the main avenue along the waterfront north of downtown and bordering Queen Anne. Just to the west, separated by rail lines, is a series of parks: Myrtle Edwards, Smith Cove, Elliot Bay, and, ultimately, Discovery Park, one of Seattle’s favorites. The Helix Bridge connects the Puget Sound waterfront to the rest of the city, and is one of only a few crossings in the area.

Because of the convenience - a trail runs from Kinnear Park, near my apartment, down to Elliot - I’ve walked or biked across this structure a hundred times. A labyrinth of trails lead past loading docks where herons, egrets, and even the occasional osprey hunt:

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The time the shutter stays open really doesn’t matter indoors when using a flash. A bright pulse lights up the room for 1/10,000 to 1/100,000 of a second; the shutter curtain seems glacial by this standard. Naturally, whether the shutter ’speed’ is 1/250 sec or 1/160 sec won’t amount to a noticeable difference. The flash has already frozen the scene in this case.

Outdoors, shooting with more ambient light, or a very reflective subject will change things. Your flash has a maximum sync speed listed in its specs telling you the fastest shutter speed you can get away with. Light will continue to flood your camera’s sensor even after the flash stops firing, and can ruin an exposure. Read the rest of this entry »

Diagonal lines are a powerful tool to draw on when composing a frame. This is true in portraiture, landscape or cityscape photography, and it’s true, sometimes even the saving grace, in abstract photography.

Here, in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, a fountain decorating the foot of a skyscraper is hardly rare. This one is outside what used to be The Sharper Image, then Charles Schwab, always a favorite meeting place for the bike messengers. A jet shoots water upward, causing ripples and even waves. Below the water is a tile bed, obscured by the movement and sun reflecting on the surface; above is a leaf, fallen from one of the nearby trees.

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Every photographer goes through a period of looking for clever ways to make use of stair cases. Mine was extremely brief, just long enough to set up the tripod for this:

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In another homage to MC Escher, this time more subtle, here is a photo of two ducks in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The ducks are just entering the frame, disturbing a dogwood reflection in their small pond near the Japanese Tea Garden. The floating leaves, in particular, make this image Escheresque.

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