All City Fence Co - South Seattle

3/8 and 1/2 - South Seattle

Rebar

Duwamish Bridge (from below)

Standing on the muddy tide flats below the Duwamish Bridge looking up at the span which opens for large boats and sail boats with tall masts.

diesel fuel

Went down to the Union Pacific switching yards in south Seattle after dinner and worked for an hour or so before the light gave out and it started raining.

gang deco georgetown

Signature

A little abstract to break the monotony of all the representational stuff I have been posting recently. This was taken in an alley between first and second ave in Belltown just a little north of Pike street in Seattle.

#121 behind the Old Rainier Brewery

This was taken behind the old Rainier Brewery in Georgetown a neighborhood in south Seattle. I have a lot more images to post for Georgetown, keep watching this space.

Seven Windows - Georgetown

This photo was taken in south Seattle in a old neighborhood called Georgetown which was the location of the old Rainier brewery. It was developed in Adobe Camera Raw 3.7 and then edited in PSE4. The post processing included a contrast mask.

wolf in the grass

three windows & a door

Other than cleaning up the lines and making them straight (more or less) I did nothing to this but the usual grayscale adjustments. This was all developed in 8bit using PSE4. The color is the way I found it. This brick wall with three windows and a door is in the same general location as my previous five or six posts, all from the same shoot taken with a few minutes of each other.

under the viaduct

This shot was taken just across the street from previous posts 24 hour access and exit only. This building was just east of the viaduct a few feet and I assume the attractive decor is probably drippings from the viaduct. I did a google on the words: under the viaduct Seattle, and here are some of the things that came up.

A transient man was stabbed late Wednesday while in a tent under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle police reported.

A 29-year-old woman was stabbed Sunday afternoon under the viaduct during an attempted rape in a parked car, the Seattle police reported.

Woman assaulted under viaduct 4/10/2007

Under the shadow of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle police officers Katrina Stuckey and Andrew West seize a crack pipe and a rock of cocaine from a woman ...

Exit Only

Don't enter this door. There is no door knob. There is a sign attached to the inside of the door. Notice the screws holding the edges and the center of the sign. I have not seen the sign but it is there. A sign doesn't have to be seen to exist [quote from Sartre here]. We see evidence of the sign but not the sign itself [quote from Saussure here].

Color was left as found. Didn't mess with the color.

blue door

Seagull in Fight

This was taken at the same site as untitled #1. I assume there is some association between the building and the tank (?).

Two Titans

Untitled #1

Tank & Pipe

Take in south Seattle in an alley just west of 1st avenue.

Mar Azul

Went down to the ship canal today and worked for a hour or two and then did some more shooting in south Seattle on the way home.

Storm Over the Islands

The first photo was taken with an E-500 & 40-150mm kit lens at f7.1 ISO200. The second shot of the same scene was taken with a Lumix FZ20 at ISO80. The noise level in the FZ20 shot is quite high even at the minimum ISO setting. The color and gray scale rendering in the E-500 was superior and all my efforts to make the FZ20 image look as good failed.

I pulled out all the stops to try and improve the FZ20 shot of Blake Island and the Ferry to make it look as good as the E-500 Shot. I used Lightroom to develop the TIFF in 16bit then opened it in PS-CS2 and changed the colormode to LAB/16. Then used curves to modify the L channel for grayscale and a & b channels for color. Then I switched to RGB/8 and applied NoiseNinja. So after an hours worth of PP the result still isn't up to the E-500 shot which took about five minutes of PP.






Here is a different development of the same E-500 negative used for the top image. This version was developed in Adobe Camera Raw then opened in PS-CS2 switched into the LAB/16 color space. The color curves a & b were steepened and the cyan blue was shifted to the right using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I got the image looking the way I wanted it and then when I flattened the layers to move back in the RGB/16 color space the image change radically. The separation between the different shades in the region of blue/cyan for the most part disappeared when I flattened the image. I think this was possibly due to the combination of using Hue/Saturation and the a & b color curves.



UPDATE

The following image of the same negative was produced using LAB/16 curves without any hue/saturation layer. The results are still inferior to the image produced in RGB/16. However the separation between different shades of blue/cyan is evident to an exaggerated degree. The overall quality of the image deteriorated in the process to moving from RGB/16 to LAB/16 and then back to RGB/16. Each one of these conversions introduces some noise into the image.

Conclusion: I am not really impressed, so far, with the usefulness of this procedure.








This photo was taken with the FZ20 zoomed out to 72mm which is 432mm equivalent.



The following pair were taken with the E-500. The top image was developed entirely in 16bit from a raw file using Adobe Camera Raw and PSE4. The second one was developed in 8bit from an SHQ Jpeg.

End of the Line

Which was taken with the E-500 + 14-45mm Kit Lens?





As promised I am doing some side by side comparisons of the Lumix FZ20 and the E-500. These shots were taken at the same place and the same time both developed from raw/tiff 16bit in LightRoom and then sized, cropped and sharpened in PE4.

I ended up liking the looks of the FZ20 image shot at native ISO 80 better than the E-500 image shot at ISO 200. The IS 8-72mm lens on the FZ20 lets me shoot at ISO 80 were I would need ISO 400 using the E-500.

Later today I will post 100% crops of both images to show you what I have already seen, the out of camera image from the FZ20 at 100% actually looked a little better than the E-500. Perhaps this is because the TIFF mode in the FZ20 still applies some sharpening even when you set sharpening in the camera to low. FZ20 doesn't have a raw mode but it does have a 16bit TIFF mode.

***FOLLOW UP*** 100% crops with 25% sharpening in LightRoom









Note: These 100% crops were sharpened in LightRoom.



In both sets the top one is the E-500 shot and there is a combination of depth of field and camera shake. The E-500 was shot at 45mm at f8 and 1/100th with the rail joiners as the point of foucs. My hand wasn't steady enough and even the rail joiners are soft when viewed at 100%.

The second photo was taken at 14.5mm f4 1/160th and the IS in mode2. The out of camera TIFF plus 25% sharpening in LR is quite sharp even with sharpening set to low and the image would require very little extra sharpening. The depth of field at 14.5mm and f4 is much greater than 45mm at f8 all other things being sort of equal.

I should have used a tripod to eliminate camera shake, however this illustrates the advantages of IS in real life shooting situations.

24 Hour Access

Rainier Beer

Taken sunday morning in the plaza a few blocks south of First and Yesler. The man who managed to stay out of the photograph was "breaking camp" a little after 9am and he had a lot of gear not all of it shown here. As I worked on this shot he kept removing his gear one piece at a time but the bicycle and the black bag and the empty bag hanging on the iron fence he didn't move. I wish he had. Anyway I decided to post the shot with the most gear in it and I intend to go back and shoot it again without any gear. Notice the photos in the plastic sleeve leaning against the bike wheel, probably his family.

Two Owls

This shot was taken from an elevated parking lot on the corner of Yesler and First Ave aka Pioneer Square. I was shooting against a strong morning sun with the subject in the shade. For that reason the subject was very flat (low contrast) and required a lot of help from Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw. The color as shot was a sickly faded pale pink and red. I didn't like it so I made it another of my blue series.

vertigo

where no road goes

Seahurst Wood