A year ago we took the kids to the Kitsap Fair and as it was getting dark we were all exhausted. But I remember looking longingly at the bright lights on the spinning rides. So this year I came back to the fair at night without kids and I was able to take some photographs.

I went to Sandpoint, Idaho about a month ago and spent time visiting with family and wading in the river.

When you take the 7:40pm fast ferry from Bremerton to Seattle and you take the 10:30pm big ferry back it gives you about 2 hours to take pictures. My sister and I have been participating in the 52Frames photography challenge. This week the prompt was "Reflection" and the waterfront proved to be ripe with potential. 
I brought my tripod along and I was able to take some Live Composite photographs and some that were just Long Exposure. 

I've had my Panasonic Lumix DC-G95D since last December, but I'm still working my way through its many features. One of the reasons I bought this model was because they advertised it could take great pictures of star trails. This magical ability can be attributed to the Live Composite feature. I'm pretty sure that Photoshop will do something like this, but I appreciate how easy and streamlined it is right here on my camera. Also, I don't have Photoshop.

While you can see the photograph building on the display, you just have to guess when to stop. When you're watching fireworks, you don't know how long they are going to last or what is coming next. If you stop to soon, there isn't anything to see. If you stop too late, it is one big ball of light and that isn't interesting. There's a counter on the display that tells you how many exposures you've done. But once you're done taking the picture, that information seems to be lost.

I've got big plans to try this out with

• The Seattle Great Wheel
• Traffic Lights
• Light Painting
• Star Trails

It was my day off with Thing #2 in tow and we wandered out to the Curley Creek Estuary. I believe that this is a purple shore crab. The water is starting to fill up with cargo due to the strike at the local port. I've always loved seeing the big ships out there and I finally found a website that will tell me more about where the boats are from and what they are up to. 

A few weeks ago I took a bus/train trip to Portland with my sister. We'd meant to take more pictures than we did and I didn't think I had any to share from the trip really. But now that some time has passed, I wanted to share some favorites

The park next to my house isn't pretty. The sidewalks are cracked. The bathrooms are closed. The storm drains get clogged.

But the fog hangs like a veil concealing blemishes and deficits. When the world is covered in a haze, it is easier to take in what you can see. Somehow the "less" is even richer. Trees that normally blend into the landscape emerge prominently, declaring their existence. A row of rocks calmly fades into the distance.

Do our brains work the same way, when there is too much to take in, too much to deal with? Should we curse the fog that rolls in or should we embrace it? Sometimes our brains work the way they should. They override systems and keep us from doing too much... seeing too much at once. Unfortunately sometimes brains don't work like they should. What was once a valuable self preservation tool, is now a crippling wall preventing the cognitive thought necessary to live.
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Whenever I think...
"Why don't they just take their meds?"
"Why don't they just get a job?"
"Why don't they just stay away from drugs?
"Why don't they just..."
... I will try to remember that they are stuck in the fog. They can't see the door that's 6 feet in front of them because there is a white wall.

Despite the threatening look the clouds were giving me, I left the house. It actually didn't matter much what the weather was doing. I was alone in the house and that meant that I didn't need to bring anyone with me. I did bring my quiet companion, my camera. So here's a few pictures from the short but happy outing we took.

I'm working on getting familiar with my new camera... a Lumix G95. I took it on a family trip to Idaho and I tried channeling my inner James Popsys. If you don't know James... you should check him out. He is an absolute delight.

Every morning in August I woke up energized and eager to see what footage the GoPro had captured over night. I had snippets of the time lapses up on Instagram the whole month of August. It was a blast and I finally got compiled into a YouTube video. So fun to see them back to back in landscape format. 
Such a great project to do with kids to learn through observation!

This is a follow up to my previous post: Daylight Long Exposure that has details about how I use the ND filter. Obviously, at sunset you can do a long exposure without using a Neutral Density Filter. However, by using the ND1000 filter I was able to do very long exposures. I enjoyed the smoothing effect much more this time.