Chihuly Northwest Room

Let's keep going with the Chihuly stuff. This amazing room features Dale Chihuly's collections of indian blankets, baskets and photographs. The glass art displayed here was influenced by these collections. I really like how you get a peek into the sealife room with it's spectacular 20 foot high sealife tower. This image was taken with my 10-18mm lens and is a panorama which explains the fairly severe distortion seen in  the image. At the risk of repeating myself, I am still amazed at the quality and power of my new Sony a6000 mirrorless camera. I have no intention of abandoning my full frame sony cameras but having so much capability in a tiny camera is still mind blowing to me. I like it so much I purchased another one for Kathy and invested in 5 high quality lenses for the e-mount system. 10mm, f4.0, 3200 ISO

Colors Overhead

This was an amazing room in the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit in Seattle. Hidden among what must be over a hundred  pieces of beautifully blown glass are a few clear glass cherubs. The lighting level throughout the exhibit halls was quite low but Kathy and I were very successful in creating images using our Sony camera's "handheld twilight" function which is essentially dark frame subtraction on steroids. This makes it possible to produce one extremely low noise file from 6 photos automatically taken at very high ISO settings, which are then very quickly aligned and merged. This extremely powerful function was very desirable in this setting since we didn't want to use a flash when photographing the glass as that would probably ruin the ambiance and result in lots of reflections and unwanted specular highlights.

Chihuly Glasshouse in Seattle

This is the beautiful glasshouse at the Chihuly Gardens and Glass in Seattle Center, WA. Kathy and I were on vacation and decided to visit. So glad we did. I was stunned by the beauty of the exhibits. I can't wait to visit again.

There Goes the Neighborhood

This is all going to end in tears, I'm sure of it. They opened up a liquor store right across the street from the Aztec temple in this striking hood mural I spotted at the Santa Fe Dam car show in Irwindale, California. Does this mean that all the Aztec dudes are going to start showing up at the human sacrifices hammered, three sheets to the wind? The skull-double headed arrow thing looks like it would hurt. The car's a Chevy, didn't catch the make.

Antipodes

Antipodes, originally uploaded by big_pixel_pusher.

American artist Jim Sanborn is into cryptography. There's a message hidden in this piece of artwork which is located just outside the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshorn museum. Although Manny and I stared at it for the better part of a minute, we didn't solve it.

Please fasten your seatbelts [Explored]

Please fasten your seatbelts, originally uploaded by big_pixel_pusher.

This is where it gets interesting

Crown Fountain

The Crown Fountain is an interactive art and video sculpture located in Millennium Park, Chicago, USA

Setting the color balance for this shot was very tough as the tower that appears to be green in the photo kept changing colors, becoming bright white and then completely dark during the 10 exposures I took. I ended up having to set my color balance manually in Adobe Lightroom. 

Crown Fountain, originally uploaded by big_pixel_pusher.