Summer’s here!

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We’ve entered the summer grilling season in the traditional Seattle way – with a rainstorm!  Actually, usually we have just a bit of a drizzle, but this day was more of a proper downpour.  I happened to be at home in the afternoon when a military plane was circling low over Redmond.  I didn’t get any good shots of it, but I did get this picture of my rain-covered grill that I liked.  It was tougher than I expected to get just the weber logo in focus and I ended up playing with aperatures for a bit before i got one that was close to what I was looking for – you can see for yourself below.

 

Happy Summer everyone 🙂

getting sunburnt in Amsterdam

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Just back from a good week in Amsterdam for the Hack in the Box Amsterdam conference and an associated training course.  The conference was interesting and unexpectedly I got fantastic weather for the week (and a mild sunburn!)…    I’ve realized I need to learn from DW at bring a cable to do some downloading/processing/uploading as I go along rather than waiting for when I get back so that I’m more efficient and likely to get through thing.  Anyway, here are some of my favorites from wandering around.

 

It didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, but stumbling across this colorful patisserie I got two sterotypical Amsterdam things with it – a bicycle waiting for customer to return and a lazy cat sleeping on the bench in front of the store.

 

Next up are a couple of shots taken from the canal while on a boat tour.  I couldn’t decide which I preferred, the black and white vs. the color but I’m leaning towards the b+w.

 

Last one for this post – a self potrait of sorts looking into a mirror mounted on the canal wall.

Rest of what I’ve uploaded available here if you want to take a look.

 

Boston in the springtime

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Just back from Boston last week where, just like you’d expect for late April (???), I got a blast of sunny weather in the 80s 🙂 for the first couple days of the trip.  I was there for the Source Boston conference (which had some really interesting talks, btw) and managed to wander around a bit before the conference started and after it wrapped up for the day to get some photos…   My two favorites of the trip come from wandering around the Boston Common and through the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

With all of the good weather they’ve been having in Boston, spring flowers were a-blooming and could be seen both in planter boxes:

And they were also in garden patches

.

 

Oh, and security PSA from the conference: a shocking number of popular mobile applications send everything in plain text.  Like the LinkedIn mobile app.

 

 

 

Clipper vacations… get away

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OK, the title makes sense to folks from Seattle who hear the commercials frequently :).  We headed up to Victoria a couple weekends ago taking the float plane up and the clipper back.  The float plane was the highlight by far 🙂 with Butchart Gardens a close second.   A sampling of pictures taken on the trip:

Shadow of our plane as we were coming in for a landing in the innner harbor:

Butchart Gardens: heather with random Bellagio-like fountains in the background:
Butchart Gardens: tulip with a bit of dew still on it

The full gallery can be found here: http://kinasacaster.smugmug.com/Travel/Canada/Victoria.

Austin mural

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I was in Austin this past weekend for the InfoSec SouthWest conference.  While I didn’t take many pictures, I did get a couple while wandering around one morning before the conference.  Still trying to digest the fantastic BBQ from the night before 🙂  Here’s my favorite of what I did take:

It seemed like it should have been some sort of tribute but I didn’t see any names or initials etc.  And there really wasn’t any graffiti or other murals or whatever on this section of the street.  I wonder the back-story of this.

frosty

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Waking up to a rainy morning got me thinking back to some of the cold, clear, frosty mornings we’ve had this past fall and winter…  I took some photos shortly after waking up one morning and this is one of the ones I liked better from those…

Seattle Icons

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First post after a really long time… Was talking with a couple of co-workers while travelling at a conference and got me inspired to look through some recent stuff and get something posted.  Went on a photo afternoon in downtown Seattle in Jan and caught Seattle icons in alignment: CenturyLink Field, SafeCo Field, Rainier and a ferry!.  Now if only I’d learned more about post-processing to get Rainier to pop a bit better…

 

Looking over the lake

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My Valentines Day photo selection – this was taken on the ferry on Lake Como on our trip to Italy a few years ago.  This was a reflection in the window of a couple looking over the lake and enjoying the view and romantic scene…

Possibly the funniest/randomest part of this ferry ride was that two independent groups of people from Oklahoma were right behind us and talking about the Sooners chances in the upcoming season and analyzing starters and strengths weaknesses.  Boomer.  Sooner.

snow-covered Ireland

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Finally getting around to posting about pictures that I took on our trip to Ireland over Christmas.  I was there for around a week, and we were snowed in for almost all of it.  Which means that the rental car looked like this for the majority of the trip:

Even if it was a bit tough to get around, it made for great scenery… 

Unfortunately it was also extremely cold and windy up on the hills so I got a bit lazy while we were out hiking.  So I’ve got some shots where I took the time to throw on the polarizer and get nice deep blue skies like the shot above and these:

   

And sometimes I was too cold to bother with it and the skies aren’t quite as nice :(.  I’m sure if I took the time to brush up on my photoshop skills then i could ‘fix’ these too.

Good reminder that my photography skills are very much a work under (snowy) construction.

Like normal, you can find more photos online in the gallery.