Check out these upload photos images:
alki beach
Image by y-a-n
i have uploaded the bigger version . This picture was uploaded before I got the pro account... please comment here instead. Thank you!
my parents: taken in alki beach, seattle. looking at downtown seattle.
Under the Banner of King Death
Image by v1ctory_1s_m1ne
It's a creepy old set of uploads tonight, again all from our weekend in London a few weeks back, and all from the Sunday when were shown around town by the best guide in the world to London's out of the way and most interesting places. Boris Johnson, you owe this man some sort of commission, stat!
Our first stop on the morning was a brief visit to St Olave's Church in Seething Lane (or rather a visit to the entrance to it's churchyard), to check out the incredible and decidely macabre archway over the gate (which due to it's ghoulish appearance ended up being the model for "The Church of St. Ghastly Grim" in Charles Dicken's "The Uncommercial Traveller").
Erected in 1658, the decoration turned out to be a timely edition in light of the horror that unfolded seven years later as the Great Plague of London swept through the city. Killing an estimated 20% of it's population (around 100,000 people back then), this, plus the Great Fire the following year, were PR issues the recently restored Charles II could have really done without (>_<)
Interestingly, Mary Ramsey, the woman who is widely believed to be 1665's "Patient Zero", who was the first recorded death from it (and therefore possibly brought the disease to London), is thought to be buried here. Other famous "residents" include Samuel Peyps, and, bizzarely, Mother Goose.
I kid you not :)
Sean and Cheryl: Drama on the dance floor
Image by gwilmore (I HATE THE NEW LAYOUT!)
I took this picture nearly three weeks before uploading it, and have sort of been agonizing over it the entire time. On the one hand, I definitely succeeded in capturing the moment here, and their pose was almost perfect; but on the other hand, there were some significant distractions all around them, including the other couples on the floor at the same time and the barrier that was used to divide the ballroom into two sections for the competition. (One of the posts for the barrier was just below Cheryl's right foot, which, along with the fact that I had to rotate the image about 5 degrees to the left, explains why this image is cropped so tightly; I tried cloning out the barrier, but that altered the floor pattern just enough to make it noticeable.) But in the end, I decided I simply had to use this picture, one way or another, so I used the Lasso tool to draw a rough outline around the couple, added a 20% Gaussian blur to the background, and feathered the selection by about 25 pixels.
All told, I spent close to an hour fiddling with this one, and if anyone has any suggestions about how I might improve it, please feel free to speak up. I might replace this at some point, although what I have here now is pretty close to what I believed I could reasonably accomplish, given the circumstances and the material I had. But working on this image did enable me to get in touch with my inner artist, and in postprocessing it, I used an approach similar to what I did with this, one of my more popular shots of Miss Gergana.
