Chihuly Glass House Sunburst

It's been raining a lot along the route of the Empire Builder train making photos out the windows difficult. The scenery is still beautiful however, especially with the foliage changing colors. We have seen green hillsides with streaks of fiery red or bright yellow leaves extending for miles.

Anyway, since I can't take more photos from the train windows, I have decided to process and post some images from past vacations. This one is from the Chihuly Gardens and Glass museum in Seattle Washington. There is a rule of thumb in photography which states, don't shoot right into the sun. HDR allows me to break lots of rules including this one.

Chihuly Acid Rain

Ok this is something I never do but I saw this nice looking couple at the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit walking around. The young man was taking a photo of the young lady posing under her umbrella. I waited till they finished and asked them both to pose for me. I shot a few sequences and thanked them, telling them to search for "Chihuly Acid Rain" on Flickr. So mystery couple, if you're out there here is your photo. Sorry it took me so long to post it.

Chihuly Glasshouse in the Blue Hour

Kathy and I were so impressed with our initial visit to the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit we decided to visit again, this time in the evening. By the time I reached the glasshouse, the blue hour had begun to set in. I walked around taking loads of pictures. At some point I finally looked up and saw the Space Needle's observation deck towering six hundred feet above the Glasshouse and took this shot.

Can't Look Away

During our Seattle vacation Kathy and I visited the Experience Music Project museum which was great. Being a music museum, the last thing I expected to see there were exhibits on Star Wars costumes and Horror Films. Both were amazing though and had fantastic displays and artifacts. This sign was fairly near the entrance to the "Can't Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film" exhibit. I blended in some imagery from my favorite artifact, the Alien from the Aliens movie.

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.