While in Seattle, we visited the museum dedicated to the glass sculptures of Chihuly. It is located right next to the space needle. 
The sculpts are in various rooms in the museum, but they are also in various garden settings. 
While in Seattle, we went to Pike Place Market. This was an amazing place.
All kinds of seafood and other stuff.
I had the pleasure of spending a week in Seattle recently and was able to take lots of pictures.
This one shows their ferris wheel and the football and baseball stadiums.
This one is looking towards downtown from the top of the space needle.
This is the ferry across Puget Sound.
Another image of mine received a second place in the Associate’s category of the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild image competition on February 11. This is the original version.
However, in order to improve it for competition, I removed some of the distracting elements. The speaker, Mark McCall did a critique of all the images and suggested a couple of small additional changes. He also said that images should always have a border. So, that said, this is the final version of the image.
I entered this image into the January Heart of Texas Professional Photographers’ Guild image contest. I took second place in the Associate Member category.
Additionally, I received notification from ViewBug. They have a system of tallying the comments and responses and then produce a year-end summary. They said I scored in the top 20% of all users on their site.
While looking out the window, I noticed how the sun was shining on an oak leaf and thought it might make an interesting picture.
I used an 85mm f/1.4 lens to control depth of field so I could throw everything but the leaf out of focus.
It rained pretty much all morning, and at times the rain got rather heavy. I looked out the back and saw water running off the oak tree and thought there might be a possible picture in it.
For this picture, I cropped the original, adjusted exposure and black levels, added contrast, sharpened it and added a vignette. Those are pretty much standard adjustments I make for any image. This fairly accurately represents the scene. Water can be seen dripping from the limb.
I took that image and converted it to black and white. This helped remove distracting areas of color, but almost seemed too sterile.
I went back to the original image and started by removing color saturation. That helped remove distracting areas of color. To give it a little more interest, I added a very light sepia tone to it.
I have been attending meetings in Marksville, LA for the past few days. Before going, I looked at a map and found there are two wildlife refuges on either side of Marksville. Yesterday, I took some time to visit Gand Cote NWR. It didn’t have a great deal to offer, but I think it is rather early for migratory waterfowl. Anyway, I got a couple of good landscapes.
There was a rather substantial wetlands area. The nature trail led up to it, and then a bridge led to an observation platform over the water. These are two images taken from the bridge.
Tamron lenses sponsored a photography contest for “Countryside” images. I entered two of my photographs. All together, they received close to 14,000 entries. There are two components to the judging. Anyone can go to the contest entires and vote for the one they like best. Then, professional judges will evaluate the images and the final winners will be chosen. The public voting period has ended, and I was notified that this images was in the top 50 vote getters.
As they say on TV, But, Wait. There’s more. This image was in the top 10 vote getters.
My Thursday afternoon schedule is rather flexible, and the last couple weeks, I have taken Thursday afternoons to take pictures around town. Yesterday, I concentrated on the Southeast are of downtown and then went to the courthouse.
Pink is normally an inviting color. To have a wall and a door painted pink and then putting a big Keep Out sign on it seemed to me to be a contradiction. This was a vacant building on the corner of Eighth and Jackson.
When is the last time you saw a building with a cistern for collecting rain on the roof? This is the Texas Fireproof Storage building on Eleventh and Mary.