Buckle up – lots of photos in this post! This past weekend we visited some friends in the Seattle area. I’m going to do two posts for that trip because I took enough photos to warrant a splitting them up. We went to Bothell, a suburb just north of Seattle, to see friends we haven’t seen since before COVID broke out in 2020. Both of our families have had children since we saw each other so we were due for a visit. The kids got along quite well and seeing them running around laughing and playing warmed our hearts.
The big thing I learned on this trip is that an overcast sky is hard to deal with and looks terrible in photos. If I let my camera pick any settings automatically, I ended up with a significant portion of the sky blowing out the top of my histogram. I had to adjust something on my camera for every photo to prevent un-editable white blobs. I did not do very well at this.
Quick technical note – all photos in this post were taken with a Nikon Z6 and a Nikkor Z 24-70mm f/4 S lens. All but one photo (noted) were taken at ISO100.
Our friends took us to Skipley Farm in Snohomish, WA. It’s more my sort of town than the bustling areas further south and busy streets of Seattle proper. Snohomish is quieter and I even saw a few 3/4 ton diesel pickup trucks. Skipley Farm is a small you-pick farm that packs a large variety of fruit into only a few acres. We were allowed to eat as we picked and my grape-loving son was in heaven.
As mentioned, the sky was doing me no favors whatsoever but I think these are nice – not good, just nice. The “I” in the apple is somewhat interesting. I like the grape leaf. The veins seem to be fighting a losing battle against whatever is killing it off.
The variety of types of grapes and apples was more than I could keep track of. I was, however, able to pinpoint Jupiter grapes as my favorite grape on the farm. They were ripe and quite sweet! God’s creatures were also in attendance this day. I found a wasp getting drunk off fresh grape juice. A macro lens would’ve been fun for this shot. If you zoom in the hairs on his bum are visible. I also found a snail who had climbed up to partake of this orangeish-pink apple as well as a daddy long-legs resting on this bright red one with some apple scab. Limited apple scab like this doesn’t affect the taste.
This apple tree seems to have bitten it and something seems to have bitten the last remaining apple on it as well. This, perhaps obviously, stood out above all the other green and thriving trees around. I thought it might be nice to highlight. The composition could use some improvement but I didn’t want the sky in the photo so I settled on this.
Despite the boring/blown out sky behind this pear tree, I sort of like this image. This tree was sitting next to the parking area. I wish I had used a slightly wider aperture to make this stand out a bit more. It may have made the sky seem a little better also but it would’ve been nice to blur the grapes in the background just a touch to draw attention to the moss and pears on the ground.
As we were driving toward the farm I spied this house and immediately announced that I’d be taking photos of it on our way back. The above photo isn’t anything I spent time on but I wanted to show a wider view of the house in this post. The good stuff comes next.
This is a different photo for me but this crop stood out for some reason. I didn’t even take a picture of the full window. The window color, moss, and rusted nails holding up the siding stood out to me pretty quickly so I tried to grab a shot of it all. I like that the photo is very geometric with the lines of the window trim and siding while there is a small part, the moss, that has a much more organic shape. It’s slowly creeping its way to any surface it can survive.
Finally this window. I wish the plywood wasn’t there but I’m not sure that I could edit it out effectively. I like this picture because you can tell that the builder was meticulous. The panels of the siding have a clear pattern of nails – two per board, presumably, along each stud. When the carpenter got to the window, symmetry was followed. I really do love the window trim. The nail locations in the top trim piece are mirrored onto the bottom trim piece just as the left piece is mirrored on the right. Upon completion of this house, I’d bet that all the nail heads were hidden with paint and thus the care that the builder took was also hidden. Over time the elements revealed the location of each nail. The yin-yang shape of the broken glass makes for some visual interest as well.
James Covello October 1, 2023
I love buildings like that! I think the plywood in the window is perfect…a half-hearted repair before someone gave up altogether.
The fruit pictures are very nice, although most of them could stand to be brightened up just a touch. The “I”-apple is a nice composition, with the branch coming up from the bottom left corner and an out-of-focus apple there, too.
The pile of apples on the ground beneath the tree has potential, but they aren’t prominent enough. Perhaps cropping square (which unfortunately makes the tree less interesting) or brightening the apples up a touch.
Overall, I think you were being very careful not to blow out the skies, but the rest of the photos (meaning everything that is *not* sky) tend to be a little dim and muddy as a result. I think that would be easy to fix by boosting the midtones a bit.
You are improving!