tree & sky from the abstracts gallery

 also, with the iPhone 4's release and then subsequently last year with the 4s, many of us iOs-ers woke up to realize that we had a pretty good camera in our pockets. i've been spending a lot more time with mine, and have started getting some pretty decent stuff.  with that in mind i've set up a new "iPhoneography" gallery and loaded eight images to start.  some of these have been tweaked a bit with a few of the apps i use, but all-in-all this little phone's 8-megapixel sensor, decent lens and great image processor makes a pretty good point-and-shoot!

12 skylights from the new iPhoneography gallery

to capture the scene, i placed my camera on the deck-side of the pool, set the motordrive to high-speed and fired off bursts, trying to time the arrivals and departures. was a remarkable scene to witness over the few days we were there...and although we never looked inside to see the little ones for fear of freaking out the parents, there was never a doubt they were in there - what a din!  we're not sure what the outcome was - the family was all intact when we left but the last two springs we've visited, the fish has remained vacant....but the sparrow population is as robust as ever.  see larger versions of this series here

tonight we went over to a local outdoor shopping center to run and errand and on the way back to the car looked up and saw this semi-abstract scene that made me think of a "burning bush".  no (real) camera, no problem - out with the iPhone and here's the image....with NO manipulation after the fact.

the second image came to me last week from a friend who has been traveling in west africa with his wife.  he has a great eye and will sometimes wander with a video camera, but when it comes to stills, the only thing he carries is his iPhone. here is one of several shots he sent me last week and then with a cool little app called instagram i was able to convert it to black & white,  crop it into a square format and add some contrast and a black border:

another problem with the old site was the galleries dependence on flash technology.  the galleries in the new site aren't flash driven, so they'll work on most mobile devices that don't or won't run flash.  the home page for the new site is still in flash, but mobile devices will be redirected to an html 5 alternative gallery where the images can be viewed in a slide show....a little klugy, but a heck of a lot better than the error message from the old site.

the site is still a little thin on content, and some of what's been put up is from the old site....just haven't had time to generate a bunch of new stuff.  the goal will be to add four or five images a week, so it shouldn't take long to get some meat on the bones.  i may be the only one that reads these posts, but if you're subscribing to the feed, the new site is actually live, it just hasn't officially been announced - you can get to him by clicking the 'home' button above or going to either h3images.com or billhughlett.com

This post is way overdue, but I have a nice assortment of 11 images hanging in the Caprice Kitchen in Ballard, 1418 NW 70th, 98117 / 206-371-2886.  This is a really nice neighborhood restaurant that serves dinner Wednesday through Sunday and brunch on Saturday and Sunday.  

Chef Anne Catherine builds the seasonal menus around visits to local farms and neighborhood markets - it's a shameless sales pitch on my part, but one I find very easy to make from personal experience.

Following are a few images from the show, along with a brief story of each.  The pieces hanging in the restaurant are also for sale so contact me if interested.  Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions.

Eventide | Morning Glory: October, 2008 - White Sands National Monument.  I'm not much of a camper but discovered that the only way I was going to be able to take advantage of the sweet light in the evenings or at dawn was to reserve one of 10 campsites in the entire monument.  it's about a half-mile hike from the parking lot, so I dragged my one-man tent, sleeping bag and about 40 lbs of gear and had an incredible three days and two nights there.  These two images were taken at dusk and just after dawn respectively

 In stark contrast to the kind of serene beauty found at White Sands, is the more chaotic beauty of the lower west side of New York City.  A friend who lives in Manhatten and I spent an evening walking the streets with our cameras and tripods in January 2010.  This image (Meatmarket) is of a wildly painted and graffiti covered meat packing plant just off the Hudson River Greenway.  It's actually a combination of five that were taken at various exposures and merged to get the full, almost surreal dynamic range (see this post for more of an explanation)

The Elysian Brewery Tangletown is located at 2106 N 55th Street in north Seattle....a bit south of Greenlake.  A little background on Tangletown (thanks to Wikipedia)....the name comes from the disturbance of Seattle's street grid in this transition zone, where the Wallingford and Green Lake neighborhoods merge. Of note are its "K streets": Kensington, Kenwood, Keystone, and Kirkwood Places N.  One of the neighborhood's principal landmarks is the Keystone Building which was built in 1910 and has been the home of various businesses over the years including the Elysian Brewery currently on the west side and Mighty-O Donuts on the east corner.  The other modern landmark is the Zoka coffee company which is directly accross the street (to the east) from the Keystone building.

If you have an interest in acquiring any of the pieces being shown, or fine-art quality note cards of the same images, you can send me an email or contact Michael Mcgiverin at artattheelysian@gmail.com

Trey Ratcliff is the second artist and his site, Stuck in Customs, is one of the most followed travel sites/blogs on the Internet.  Trey specializes in an emerging form of digital photography called "HDR" (high dynamic range) which is the digital equivelent to the old days of using graduated neutral density filters or sandwiching negatives or slides to capture a wider range of exposure than film or a camera's sensor is capable of.  Some people love the style....some people don't.  I'm more on the positive side of the movement but am trying to find my own comfort zone as I've never heavily manipulated my images and it's sometimes a challenge to retain a natural look when merging four or five images with a wide range of exposure.  

Below is one of my first HDR attempts, followed by a strip of the four images it was taken from.

I'll be showing a wide selection of my work this coming Saturday, April 11, 2009 at Melinda Hannigan's studio (in the Equinox Studios complex) for the April Georgetown Art Attack. Melinda's studio is number 302 - we'll be there from 5pm to 9pm and would love to see anyone who can stop by. Melinda will also have some of her finished and in-progress work on hand and you'll want to get up close and see the detail in her beautiful paintings.  I wrote about Melinda in a post last summer (you can also scroll down as it was only four posts ago).

Equinox Studios is located at 6555 5th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98108.  It is located just south of the 1st Avenue South bridge....going south on Highway 99, instead of bearing right to cross the 1st Avenue South bridge, bear left onto East Marginal way.  Cross Michigan Street, then left on River and an immidiate left onto 5th Ave South.  Directions from the Equinox site can be found here; or from Google maps here.

Please stop by!

 
Christine Paintner is a friend of ours who runs Abbey of the Arts, a site chalked full of rich spiritual and inspirational content.  Christine also writes and publishes a great deal of content in books and journals that feature her work as well as others'.  Her Spring 2008 Reflective Art Journal is titled Illuminating Mystery: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice and features the work of several artists who she's interviewed for a Sacred Artist Interview series on the Abbey site - you can read more about it here.  I was interviewed by Christine last year and part of that conversation and a favorite image from this site are featured in Illuminating Mystery.  Please spend some time browsing the Abbey website -- you won't be disappointed.