Capitol Hill

I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA. I've always wanted to live in the city and even when I was in LA I never had the ability to just park my car and walk to the grocery store or local coffee shop. I could never get drunk at a local bar and stumble home. The city was never easily accessible. That all changed when I moved to the Hill.

 

Many people say that Capitol Hill has changed for the worse. Gentrification has happened once again and old buildings are being torn down only to be replaced with parking lots and condos. The Cha Cha is one such place. A hipster haven on Pike, Bimbo's Bitchin Burrito's used to be located about 1/2 a mile down on Pike, but the building was torn down in preperation for either the Monorail extention or a condo building...I can't actually remember which! When Bimbo's relocated into their new spot, they created a club downstairs called The Cha Cha. Filled with memorabilia from Lucha Libre, it's dark, red, has a photo booth and $5 pitchers of Rainer Beer. They have subsiquently opened a Cha Cha in LA in the Silverlake neighborhood, sans Bimbo's. You might remember that a good friend of mine enjoy's a game of foosball there every now and then.

I felt like wandering today so I called my friend Casey and he agreed to join me. We met up at Bimbo's to catch up and eat some food before our walk. I captured the picture above when in the middle of Casey telling a story I noticed that my camera was on and had the shot already loaded into the view finder. I had to mess with the settings a bit but I was really excited to achieve the blurred background affect by bringing my F stop to around 3.5. I finally remembered something Del had taught me and I think it turned out really well!

 

I had always thought the Jimi Hendrix Memorial was in a very strange location. On the corner of Pine and Broadway, Jimi sat in front of an empty building. Finally just a couple months ago Everyday Music open it's doors and Jimi is now situated right in front of an excellent independant music store. I got down in front of the statue looked up to see the sky finally blue after a day of gray. I quickly snapped a few shots as the fluffy white clouds flew by. 

We headed over to Volunteer Park just as the sun was setting. Coming upon the reservoir I saw quite a few couples sitting around waiting for the sun to set. Del loves doing back lit photo's and I thought I might try my hand at one. Of course, I'm lacking his awesome skills and I ended up getting the couple full on in the shot instead of backlit; of course it didn't help that the guy was wearing a white shirt! It's still kinda sweet.

 

This is Black Sun, which supposedly inspired Soundgarden's song "Black Hole Sun". It's always been a wish of mine to capture a really beautiful shot of this scuplture, and I don't think I've done it just yet...but it's a good start.

 

A couple weeks ago I went to a little secret garden about a block away from my apartment that Casey showed me when I moved in. It's a bit of an oasis in the middle of the city and not a lot of people know it's there. Unfortunately it's become pretty overgrown and although there were some lovely flowers scattered about, there wasn't enough light for me to get a really lovely shot. I did, however, find this little guy hiding behind some brush.

Also of note, when Del and I were doing one of our walks in Bellevue we saw a poster for a lost cat. Instead of a picture of said kitty, there was a stick figure drawing of a cat. We laughed about it and figured that no one else would be stupid enough to post a sign like that. Then about a week ago up the road from my house I saw the sign in the above picture. I made it black and white as it's not that interesting a shot, but in black and white everything looks cool. 

So if anyone sees a clip art cat lingering around....

I'm hoping this will be an on going project for me, but I was really happy with the results of my outing today so I felt compelled to post what I have. I also will be giving more of a history of my lovely neighborhood in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!