Fine Art Photography Blog

With planets, nebulas, smiley faces, and a giant reflecting lake, Seattle’s fireworks are rumored to be among the most impressive in the country. Unlike the show on New Year, coming out of the Space Needle, these are launched from a barge on Lake Union.  Most of these photos were from the Moss Bay dock, where I launch my kayak:

This is one of my favorites of the night; the colorful embers spilling down from the two main explosions, and the streaming plumes of fire shooting upward make up for the darkening sky:

The lake was filled with more boats than water.  As the show went on, a thick blanket of smoke condensed on the lake, obscuring the surface level view in the lake.  The Aurora Bridge is barely visible in the bottom-right corner of the frame:

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A friend of mine loves one of my photos of the city because it shows a crane … a constant fixture in our skyline. Typically the crane would be a minor distraction, but it strikes a chord, at least with recent Seattle residents. Until the 1970s we were a sleepy hamlet in the northwest, a parochial stop between Vancouver and San Francisco. Boeing and Microsoft changed all of this … along with the passing of time in general.

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By tradition, we like to ring in the New Year with a fireworks show from the beloved Space Needle.

Living in Queen Anne, I hiked up to Kerry Park for the show. Near the top of the hill, and situated directly opposite both downtown, in the background, and the Space Needle; this is the one place in the city where the Needle looks like it could be standing next to other sky scrapers.

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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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