Day 180: A Walk to the Sound

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently made a Twitter pact with a friend vowing not to give up on our individual Project 365s.

(Sidenote…what’s more binding, a Twitter pact or a pinky swear?)

The day after making that commitment I decided to take a walk down to Puget Sound. It really is a rather extraordinary walk. The road I take is right around the corner from my house in West Seattle, but it feels a bit like I’m walking down a trail in the middle of the woods (except when cars go flying past, of course!).

It’s a short walk down Fairmount Canyon to the water — a little less than a mile. Along the way there are a few houses, but much of it is just woods. There is one property that has an old rope fence that I’d always been drawn to but had never photographed.

Throughout the entire walk down I could hear sea lions barking in the distance. It always amazes me when we can actually hear them from our house (usually only at night when there’s less traffic on our busy street). It’s a nice reminder of how close we are to wildlife, even in the city.

Being a photographer in Seattle, it seems only natural that I end up with a ton of photos of the Space Needle. But I get so tired of them, so I try to do something a little different given the opportunity.

And yes, the top of it has been re-painted to its original “galaxy” orange in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the 1962 World’s Fair for which it was built.

I wandered down to the Water Taxi dock and meandered around there for a while.

It took me a minute to notice this when I was strolling the dock, but what’s wrong with this picture?

Ok, this next one needs a little explaining. I was walking along the dock and noticed that there were a ton of jellyfish right at the surface. I didn’t have my polarizing filter with me (which would help reduce reflections), but took a few shots of the water nonetheless.

When I started working this one in post production, I was shocked to see that I captured a lot more than what I could see with the naked eye. I actually didn’t do as much as you might think to the photo. Just using Lightroom, I lowered the blacks and shadows, and increased the highlights and contrast. Then I played around with the white balance a bit to get more of the fish (which I did not even know were there until I got home!)

It’s just further proof that sometimes there really is a lot more beneath the surface than meets the eye!

My walk wouldn’t have been complete without a little abstraction. Apparently this log was out to sea for a long time before drifting ashore.

After the sun had set, I walked back up Fairmount Ave. It was quite a bit darker at that point, and the flowers along the road seemed to be glowing in the twilight.

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