Someone has been tagging grates lately with small bits of advice, uplifting statements, etc. This one was out in front of the Seattle Art Museum. I’ll keep documenting them as they show up in the coming weeks. In the mean time continue seeking wisdom folks.

I had a totally different vision of this morning’s photo. Cars whizzing by as I stand in traffic under the monorail, clouds, no fisheye needed. However, I shot that shot. It’s below. This top one is better. Not because it’s an actual depiction of the sky or ground, or monorail, but because it’s distilled down to essentially three vibrant colors, makes me happy and is by no means the photo I had in my head.

Here’s to a week of surprises, art, code, nerdery, food and hopefully downtime with Spun as well as uptime with friends. Vibrant. A new twist. Surprising.

Love this tag. Fantastic. Beautiful concise lines.

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.