After two straight days of disappointment from staying up very late during the weeknights to capture the Northern lights, I had high hopes for this week’s Perseid Meteor Shower.  As all of my friends know, I’m a big astronomy buff and the only thing that kept me from pursuing a career in astronomy was my hatred for higher level mathematics.  This year’s shower was said to be one of the best in a long time, so I was determined to go out and see it.  Thankfully, my friend Sasha volunteered to drive and my cousin Wence and my friend Kyle wanted to go out and see some shooting stars as well, so I had a nice little group to keep me company.  We decided to head east and found a nice dark spot at the edge of Rattlesnake Lake, just south of North Bend, WA.

Capturing shooting stars themselves proved to be rather difficult, despite the great number of them that we saw.  The majority of them were indeed coming from the northeast from the constellation Perseus, but it really ended up being pretty random for where we saw the really bright ones.  I was still lucky enough to capture a nice bright one in the photo above, complete with 30 minutes worth of star trails.  Here is another capture from earlier in the night, with a shooting star at the bottom left and Jupiter bright at the bottom right:

The moonless sky and the area we staked out proved to be great overall for star viewing.  You can clearly see the faint dust of our own Milky Way Galaxy in this photo:

Here, you can see The Milky Way again as the backdrop behind the bright stars of the Summer Triangle (the star Vega being a little right and up of dead center):

Rattlesnake Lake itself was gorgeous at night, taken in these two captures that both lasted 5 minutes.  This was facing south, with the ambient light most likely coming from a parking lot in the distance.

You can see more starry starry night photos that I took on this same night here:  http://verdugo.smugmug.com/Landscapes/Rattlesnake-Lake-8-13-2010/13323806_fZDEE#968614184_nba4y

I was fortunate enough to spend the majority of last Saturday in the company of Erica and Angi.  This was simply just a fun photoshoot which also happened the serve the purposes of getting some formal headshots for Erica to start building her portfolio and to drive all the Subaru guys out there nuts: both Erica and Angi drive STIs.  We’re planning to do more photos in the future with their respective cars, so please keep an eye out for that.  In the meantime, here are a few of my favorites from the photo session, each taken with my D300 and Nikkor 85mm ƒ1.8 lens:

And here’s the entire gallery…special thanks to Angi for helping hold the flash on a bunch of these:

A little over a week ago, my brother, sister-in-law, and two nieces were in town for a short vacation.  We spent a couple days up in Victoria BC, along with visiting Snoqualmie Falls.  The weather was great throughout their entire trip, which made for some really nice photo opportunities, such as the above sunset photo overlooking Victoria’s Inner Harbor.  Here’s a few of the other highlights:

The Empress Hotel in Victoria:

Darth Vader playing the violin:

The Parliament Building at night:

The Empress Hotel at night:

The “Sunken Garden” in the Butchart Gardens:

And a couple epic Snoqualmie Falls photos:

Just like last year, I spent Independence Day atop Eugene’s apartment building in the U-District of Seattle to watch the fireworks over Lake Union. The weather wasn’t quite as nice as last year’s, but the cloud cover helped reflect some of the light down, making the whole show seem a bit brighter. Here’s a link to all my photos:

http://verdugo.smugmug.com/Events/Independence-Day-2010/

And a few of my favorite photos, followed by the Flash-powered gallery:

Notice the shirt that Jayr is wearing?  That’s actually his wife, Mae from a shoot that we did awhile back.  This of course makes it the best shirt ever!  I asked Mae to take a photo of the shirt by itself and she was happy to share this with me:

And here of course is the original photo it was taken from, by yours truly:

Awesome stuff! I’ll be adding a few photos from that old shoot to my portfolio here at some point.  Thanks again to Mae and Jayr for letting me post this up!

Yesterday, March 6th marked my annual visit to my Alma Mater’s “Quad,” which features cherry blossoms or “sakura.”  The sakura were in bloom earlier than usual this year thanks to Él Niño, and with a grey and wet forecast upcoming, it was more packed than any of the previous years I’ve visited.  Nevertheless, the Quad was as gorgeous as always, and continues to prove that the University of Washington’s campus is more visually appealing and stunning than any other college campus I’ve visited.  It definitely gives me a sense of pride that I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees from such a beautiful place.  Special thanks to Monica and Tex for joining me on this photo outing!  Here’s the SmugMug slidehow for all of the photos: