Brian Abbey Seattle

By Brian Abbey My name is Brian Abbey, and I was born and raised in Seattle. Well, Burien, actually, and I spent a lot of time in Leavenworth. But I’ve lived in and around Seattle my whole life, where it rains, on average, 155.3 days per year and where we have 152 days of sunshine per year. You can learn a lot through statistics and averages. The average annual high temperature is 59º and the low is 45º and we have 2,019 average hours of sunshine per year. You can learn other things too, like that it doesn’t get real hot for real long, and eventually it always, and I mean always rains. But there are some things that statistics can’t tell you in any meaningful way. Like the fact that this year it got real hot, hotter than I can ever remember. And it was dryer than I can remember it ever being.  And as these extreme weather events keep playing out, people start conflating a heat wave with climate change. Now, I’m not an atmospheric scientist, but I do have a degree in environmental...

My name is Brian Abbey and I am a real estate photographer in the Seattle area, and I also shoot often in Leavenworth and Wenatchee. I get asked frequently about my recommendations for choosing the right gear. Both Seattle and Leavenworth offer some unique shooting environments. One is frequently rainy and wet, and the other is frequently extremely hot or cold. Both are important considerations when choosing a camera system. In the wet, Seattle weather I really appreciate a rugged and durable camera that holds up to damp wet weather. In the extremely hot and cold environments of Leavenworth and Wenatchee, a camera that can operate in very hot and very cold temperatures is helpful as well. The most important considerations for me are really dynamic range, or how well the camera sees the lightest and darkest aspects of a scene, and the color science, or the ability of the camera to accurately reproduce the colors in a scene. Some photographers get into pixel peeping, or looking for...