Metro/ Natural

Recently, I've been really enjoying using my camera again. I took a basic digital photography class spring quarter this year, and I learned a ton. Before I basically just had an eye for cool pictures, and now I really know what goes into making a picture great. I've been a ton more active in the process, as opposed to just throwing it on auto and hoping for the best. Over the course of the spring and summer I've been shooting around Seattle with a general theme in mind: the combination and contrast of the urban setting with nature. This happens all over the place here, and I went out across the city to try to find it. These pictures are all high dynamic range, which means that they are composed of more than one photo of the same subject combined in Photoshop and edited so that everything in the picture is evenly exposed regardless of differences in light levels. Under the cut you will find these pictures as well as a little blurb about the picture and how I accomplished it.

Gasworks Park at Sunset - 3 exposures looking south across Lake Union at Gasworks Park. Taken right at sunset so that the red light from that combined nicely with the blue in the rest of the sky and the water. I love the colors in this one.


Capitol Hill Sky - 4 exposures taken out of a 12th story window in Campion Hall. The clouds are what I was trying to focus on the most here and they ended up coming out better than expected. I love how you can see the slight outline of the mountains in the background.


Green and Red - Trees and the Garrand Building on campus. I didn't have a specific aim in this picture, but I really like the way that the colors turned out, especially the greens. This is a HDR composed of two exposures.


Gray Skyline - Another skyline shot, 3 exposures taken from my friend's roof. This is another picture where I was aiming at capturing the full glory of the clouds, but they didn't come out quite as good as the other cloud shot. It's striking how different the skyline looks based on where you are looking at it from.


Green - Taken out my dorm room window. 2 exposures.


Amazon.com - This is the Amazon.com corporate headquarters. It sits by itself on top of a huge hill, so my aim was to capture it's majestic loneliness. The contrast of the blue and orange in this picture is really striking.


Through the Trees - 4 exposures taken from a park at the top of Beacon Hill. This is the picture that really got this project going, I absolutley love the skyline framed with those trees and bushes.


Blues and Greens - 3 exposures taken out of the 7th floor of Bellarmine hall. I love the perspective in this, so many different buildings and crazy angles are going on here it can be hard to figure out what's actually going on and where this was taken. My photography teacher couldn't believe that I didn't heavily alter this one.

The whole set plus bigger sizes can be found at my flickr.