I got back over the weekend from my Seattle Lightroom seminar and I thought I’d share a photo I took while there. First off, a big thanks to everyone who came out. Like always, I had a great crowd and met lots of people who follow the blog.

The Backstory and Why I Didn’t Want To Go Shoot
Okay… a little backstory here. I landed in Portland on Monday and shot sunrise and sunset all week. Throw work, emails, meetings, and lots of driving in there and by the time Friday evening came I was pretty tired. I had an early flight home Saturday morning (I knew I’d have to wake up at 4:45am to make it) so I planned on finishing my seminar and just relaxing in my room that evening.

I Had Never Really Seen Mt. Rainier
Now, all I know from Seattle is the weather the past 3 times I’ve been there and it’s been rainy and cloudy. I’m told it’s actually very nice there as well, but I must have bad timing. In fact, some one came up and told me that it’s Seattle secret to tell everyone that it rains a lot when it really doesn’t 😉 Anyway, I’d been up to Kerry Park in Seattle several times trying to get a good sunset. Each time I’ve been there, you’d never even know Mt. Rainier was off in the distance because it was covered by clouds. But looking at the weather after my seminar, I could see it was going to be a nice clear sunset so I decided to grab my camera, tripod and give it a go. As soon as I parked my car, I knew it was gonna be good.

Here’s the photo (click to see it larger)

I Waited For A Specific Photo
I set up camp, took a few photos before the sun went down but waited for this one. See, there’s a really narrow window of a few minutes to get the shot I wanted. I wanted the lights on in the city. But I still wanted some color in the sky and some light on Mt. Rainier in the background. If you shoot to early, then you can’t see the lights on in the city even though Rainier is lit. If you shoot too late, then the sky is just a plain blue sky with no color and you lose all the light on Mt Rainier.

Gear
• Nikon D800 Body
• Nikon 28-300mm lens
• Gitzo Traveler Tripod
• Really Right Stuff BH-41 ballhead

I also went back to the basics here. I found the D800 has such large files and such great detail, that if you don’t have an absolutely sharp photo you can’t really appreciate it (and you can notice the lack of sharpness more). So I was locked down on the tripod, turned on mirror-lock in camera, and used the built-in camera timer (set at 2 seconds) because I forgot my cable release 🙂

Post Processing
Not much here. Some white balance adjustment in Lightroom to warm the photo just a bit. Added a vignette, and some dodging and burning in Photoshop to brighten up some of the lights in the skyline. All totalled I think I spent about 5 minutes on it.

What was even cooler is that I ended up meeting a couple people up there who follow the blog. I turned out that one of them was even at the seminar earlier that day, so I had some shooting buddies. Enjoy!