Just wanted to drop a quick “Hello!” from my stop off in Pike Place Market, home to the flying fish, great produce, hand made wares by folks like Red Delicious Bags, cheese, French pastries, Irish pasties, Russian piroshkies, and Rachel the pig.

I’ll be traveling around in the coming months, so stay tuned for more exciting photos in exotic destinations both domestic and abroad.

Sleeplessly,
M

Snapping a photo without anyone in it proved more difficult than I originally expected of Rachel, Pike Place Market’s mascot and her other pigs on parade. Good thing I had the fisheye lens handy.

Another gorgeous day in Seattle. Supposed to get almost up to 70° today and then tomorrow, oh man, 74°. Can’t even believe it myself. I’m hoping to ride in a lot more in the next few months. Even though the board is Never Summer, I’d like to think it’s Seldom Summer here in Seattle. But when it is… watch out. This is the most beautiful place in the world.

About the photos … I used my fishers lens from Photojojo’s iPhone lens pack. A couple angles of the alley, one at the entrance showing of this beautifully sunny Seattle day.

Ok, so these are admittedly a bit odd and out of the norm from my standard photo a day. They’re a composition of two separate shoots I did this morning, one in Pike Place Market‘s alley next to the gum wall and the other is Anthony’s on Pier 66. The latter is one I almost included in the photo a day series last year on 8.30.2010 … somehow managed to not include it because of a great panorama. This was just two days after I leapt from the sky at Skydive Snohomish and three days before Spun left Starbucks to get going on Smitten + Spun. What a week that was!

So ever since then I’ve been waiting for a pristine day. One that is crystal clear where even the clouds that added nice texture to that missing photo were gone from the sky.

Today was that day. For some reason though, having this massive blue canvas behind the point of the roofline felt really empty, especially after walking through Pike Place Market. So I improvised with something bizarre. Two apps Pro HDR (a tried and true app that I’ve been using long before Apple decided to make an HDR option for the iPhone) and one that I use almost every day, The Best Camera.

So the wonkieness comes in with how I used Pro HDR. I didn’t just use two shots of different exposures, I used two totally different photos and merged them together. It took some finessing to adjust which was better suited for the brighter/darker image, but once I got that squared away, it was just a matter of tweaking the contrast, hue, etc a bit to get it the way I wanted. From there, I took these mutant, layered, mishmashed images into Best Camera and tweaked the hell out of the color on them.

Yes, blue skies in seattle are a rarity, according to KOMO News we get 58 a year. I’ve heard … sadly … elsewhere it’s as high as 71. So why nuke the sky with graffiti? Because I’m optimistic that we’ll have another one soon, and this was just too much fun to not use the blue canvas as a painter’s paradise.