Work decided to give us a morale boost after a slightly rough beginning of the month so we got to head up to the summit in Snoqualmie. It fit in with my once a year ski schedule and was a good time.
Got some good nature photos. The mountains really are pretty when snowcapped, who knew?
This was just a fun shot from the gas station that has become one of my favorite. I seem to really like reflections be they in mirrors or something else:
We got a little bit of snow but looks like this might have been the last day.
Buildup and corrosion on a car:
Catching the light:
Little buildings against a big building:
Even more snow yesterday. Although it only lasted for a couple of hours it was coming down at the rate of about some inches an hour. I also took a lot of shots walking around with the flash just playing around to see if I could direct it at all.
I like how the flash filled in the bushes here:
This was a little far away for the flash to hit but I still liked the photo:
Just a wall but I like how it looked:
Self-portrait walking down the street:
Playing in front of the mirrors and this was the best that turned out. Scary right :):
And a slightly less scary one:
When we got home the snow started and as I mentioned it was an insane amount of snow. Although it was gone this morning.
My favorite of the cables with crazy snow on them:
Some bamboo:
And trees with the flakes showing up in the foreground:
Street scenes which I am not as big as a fan of but they definitely show the snow:
But I will add some anyways. Again taken over the last couple of weeks but these were more about capturing a particular moment than anything else.
One of the first mornings with crazy snow and the bus drivers were still filled with hubris. They thought they could make it up the hill where all of their colleagues had failed. If you count you can see two stalled buses and the third trying to pass them:
The way that they moved a lot of the stalled buses was by running into them with a smaller truck to get them moving again which I thought was a little weird but what do I know:
Another bus related issue that apparently made CNN were the two buses that ran off the road in the middle of a random neighborhood over the highway. I am not sure how these charter buses ended up on that road but they definitely could not easily navigate. My favorite were all the passengers trying to make it to random places with their luggage. You will have to look close for the buses. This is the first situation in which I wanted a lot more length on my lens than I have. Normally I would just walk down there but the cops were keeping everyone out:
Due to all the snow the garbage situation got pretty awful as it could not be picked up. They finally got that resolved this weekend but it started to really stack up everywhere. Here was right outside of Nordstrom's flagship store:
As they say though one man's garbage is another's treasure. Here are a pile of sleds for Denny that look a lot like garbage to the untrained eye:
In addition to the garbage trucks not running, the delivery trucks were halted as well. This meant no holiday cinnamon rolls for me and no milk for a lot of people (unless you wanted lactaid or soy):
Yachi and I also fell down quite a bit on the really snowy / icy sections of road which was funnier than I remember falling on hard ice being:
On an animal related front, this dog was really excited by the snow and dragged this chair along with him in his effort to really experience the weather:
Our cats were much more sanguine about the whole deal and decided to relax instead of heading out:
All in all it has been quite a crazy past couple of weeks that has been really enjoyable. You can always find more pictures of the above mentioned times here.
Still catching up on photos from the last week or two. Here are some that involve people that I really like for whatever reason.
Yachi at the end of a day of walking all over:
Biker on the street deciding to walk the bike instead of skating on the ice:
A biker who decided to just keep trying to get through the snow:
Another hidden soldier:
Someone braving Denny on the iciest section:
Yachi's bright socks:
And a shy model:
And the rest here.
So after a week of taking photos of the snow here are my six favorite. Surprisingly there are not that many pictures of just snow. Turns out to not be that exciting or I am not creative enough to make it interesting. Although if you check here there are some photos of snow to give you an idea of how crazy it was here for the last week.
Today it started raining / heating up so we will probably have snow for Christmas but not much beyond that. I am a little sad that the days working from home are going to be over as I was able to gain back two hours a day from commuting and put that towards having fun. Maybe I will look for a job in Seattle... In this economy I think I might wait.
This was taken off the balcony one morning before sunrise with the tripod. I really like the flare of the light as it reminds me of getting a super clear in Katamari II:
This is outside of our condo. I like the contrast of what I always think of as a tropical plant (which is an incorrect belief) with the snow. Weird to see such green with the snow:
This is a random shot that I really liked. I was happy with this as I did not need to crop any. Finally starting to get the shot right in the camera which is what I am aiming for:
Walking home one night on Pine when the traffic was crazy backed up due to the snow. For those in the know it went from Pine and Boren to 11th. It was bananas. I really like the colors and the lack of structure. I have been working on a post called "Pretentiousness Ahead" which goes more into this idea and really lives up to its title:
This was a morning shot when the snow was finally breaking. I like how different the layers of clouds were and how pretty the sky looks:
This is from today and I like the difference in the focus on the birch trees. It also reminds me of growing up as we had a big (for a birch) birch tree in our front yard we used to climb and play on:
Overall the last week has been awesome in terms of me feeling like I am growing in learning how to take pictures. I am glad we got the snow and oh yeah happy birthday Baby Jesus.
Not really. The goal was to have the objects in motion and the background remain still which I managed to catch in a few but not all.
This was easily my favorite as the background is mostly frozen and I was able to catch the car and the lights which I think looks pretty cool.
As a random side note I almost got frostbite in my fingers from taking these as it was soooo cold that night:
This was my second favorite and I will need to spend more time playing around with this concept. I think the juxtaposition of the images is something I have liked since I fell in love with Magritte. I have been thinking about it a lot and am looking forward to taking some time to figure out how to make better versions of this idea:
Even though everything is moving here I like the sense of motion and the sky:
This just kind of looks like spiders on the orange which I thought was fun:
As always more here.
So I am writing this on Sunday night as my laptop froze up with over a 1000 pictures from the last week on it and I just got it working. I have a lot to catch up on and this is the first snow we got. I wandered around Greenlake last weekend and got a lot of decent photos of the snow.
It was good practice for the rest of the week as it has been ridiculous here with most of the city closed down due to the heavy volume of snow. Today there has been at least 18 inches (or probably 4) but a lot nonetheless. Now that things are working I will get those 1000 pictures posted :).
This is not necessarily the snow but just a shot I really liked due to the dress out of focus in the foreground:
Lots of snow on the bushes:
And in the boulevard:
And even put together into a snowman:
The best though was this guy feeding the gulls on the lake. The gull kept looping around and pulling up to eat basically out of the guys hands. Overall it was pretty awesome:
As always more here.
Continuing my habit of posting about events that happened quite some time ago (In this case 3 weeks). I have decided to post photos of a trip I took to Tahoe for my friend Adam's bachelor party.
I got into the airport around the same time as Adam and his brothers so I got to be part of the trip to Costco to stock up for the weekend.
As you can see I was prepared for the shopping trip:
We stayed in a three floor cabin in the mountains with a spectacular view of the lake. We spent quite a bit of time hanging out on the deck looking out over the water and chatting which proved to be a great way to spend the time.
The place was probably the height of bachelor fashion in the '70s. It has automatic curtains and a pool by the master bedroom. Lots of late seventies kitsch. Oh and video games, Adam brought a Wii and an old n64 so I got to break out the ass whipping on both mario kart and goldeneye. That alone would have made the weekend worth it. It has been a while since I flexed those particular muscles and it is nice to see that something you dedicated 5 years of your life to doesn't just disappear.
We also managed to get out skiing which turned out to be a lot of fun. I was not quite prepared as I forgot some relatively basic things like a mask or sunglasses even and was not too happy about that:
Everyone else also managed to convince me that I was up to an expert level run after going down one random blue. I was not quite as sure and look it in this picture:
Both of us kind of turned out to be right. I slide down the steepest part of the run on my face but once I got that behind me I was able to keep up pretty well. Overall it reminded me of why I like skiing so much and how much fun it is.
For the following day we just hung out at the sports book in the casino where I saw my two $10 bets on Xavier go south. It really only bothered me cause everyone there was UCLA fans and I have decided that California sports fans of all stripes are some of the most obnoxious around.
After the games we had a great dinner and lost even more money at the casinos:
A great weekend that I will remember for a while.
Some more random photos of the weekend and the view.
http://picasaweb.google.com/justin.baird/TahoeSkies
http://picasaweb.google.com/justin.baird/AdamSBachelorPartyAtLakeTahoe
