Gas Works Photo Adventure Spectacular Thing

About 8 years ago now I bought a Nikon D70 DSLR. I'd been interested in photography for a while and had the disposable income so I took the plunge. Oddly enough, I had to take the plunge twice as the first one was stolen from my truck in Palm Springs, so that was a nice surprise. So much for buying another lens with that money. I digress...

I used it off/on for a while then it sort of sat in the closet in favor of the far more convenient and versatile point and shoot except for special occasions. I dunno, I think a lot of it was lack of motivation and good things to shoot that were close by. There are only so many photos you can grab of shitty HB surf and while there were some great sunsets that was about it; I just wasn't motivated to hop in the car and go somewhere and take some cool photos. Oh, I still loved to take photos but I just wasn't feeling it like I was when I first got the camera, which is sad.

Well, this past weekend the weather was stellar here so I decided to go out and shoot some real photographs at Gas Works Park in Seattle. This adventure reminded me of a few things:

1. Seattle is such a cool city
2. I really love photography
3. I'm  pretty good at taking photographs

Gas Works is a photography playground. There are so many cool colors, structures, funky angles and shapes, silly graffitti and wide open green-space in the steampunk sort of throwback to an earlier time in this cool city that it makes taking great photographs a much easier process as a lot of the work is already done for you, it's just up to you to capture it.

From Gas Works

Along those lines, I'm not too shabby with a camera. It comes naturally, I guess, that I have great composition skills when it comes to filling a frame and capturing an image; just sort of know what looks right and it's always gratifying to see great images you captured. I've weened myself off using the auto-focus and will eventually ditch the camera's metering assistance and go full manual but who knows if that's totally necessary; technology can be pretty handy. I've got friends that are semi-professional photogs and an aunt that is in the same boat and I think I'll be spending time with them to help get me up to speed on the technical side of photography so I can use more of the buttons and dials on the camera more effectively than I currently do.

From Gas Works

Here are the photos from the 300 I took but whittled down to about 70 that were what I felt were the best works.

http://bit.ly/cfAASe

Facebook compresses everything so it's kind of hard to really get a feel for some of these photos there but you're welcome to check that album out, too. You know how to find it.

More photography outings to come in the future...

Enjoi.