Seattle Today 2011.01.22

I belong to an online photo group called DPChallenge ( http://www.dpchallenge.com). This is an international group of photographers who gather electronically, share their photographs in a competitive environment to learn and improve their photography and editing skills. By and large those who are active develop relationships with other photographers but we seldom, if ever, meet in real life (IRL). Those of us in Seattle and surrounds met IRL last Saturday to get to know one another and to shoot Seattle.

It was a wonderful winter day in Seattle and here's my take.

Sign just across the alley from the "gum wall" near the Pike Place Market.
Seattle skyline from Belltown. To answer Melethia's question: I used my standard HDR work flow. 7 photos taken 2/3 of an f/stop apart from -2 to +2 stops in total. I set ISO at 400 and aperture at f/9, the sweet spot for my Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 lens. Normally I would use a tripod but I didn't have one with me so I shot it handheld. Thankfully I'm pretty steady and the heavy D3 doesn't move much ... with a lens, the camera weighs about 8-9 pounds and it has a lot of inertia. I also get quite a workout on a day long shoot :) Shutter speed was around 1/4000 on the shortest exposure. That may seem overly fast but Photomatix does a good job aligning photos that have no motion blur so when I know I'm going HDR I try to shoot fast. My camera does burst mode so the total elapsed time to shoot the 7 exposures was about 3/4 of a second. I imported the seven RAW files into Photomatix to create an aligned HDR image and tone mapped it with Photomatix. I saved the results and opened the tone mapped image in Photoshop CS5. I then resized and cropped to yield 3000x2000 image but no further post processing was required. Save for web and publish to Smug Mug. If this was headed to a client or a commercial destination ... I would do a little cleanup of minor sensor dust and do some destination specific sharpening ... but I didn't do it here.
Olympic sculpture park. Free. Recommended!
Olympic sculpture park. Free. Recommended!

Totem detail. This totem pole is in the park just west of the market.
Totem detail. This totem pole is in the park just west of the market.
Building just north of the sculpture park.
Starbuck's original logo. Changed a bit since the beginning. I like the original.
Some of my DPC buddies. Top Row: brchambe, Brent_S, franktheyank, HeatherD, ScooterMcNutty, Zencow Bottom Row: Agaricus, Ductyl, jbsmithana, Art Roflmao, smardaz