This Saturday, May 25, local gift boutique Charley + May is hosting another fun weekend event for the neighborhood.

This weekend, the shop will be featuring photographer Nicole Rule at an event celebrating upcoming summer travel and fun.

Nicole will on hand to take “playful passport porlaroids” for families that stop by. In addition, the free event will feature lemonade, fun prizes, and a drawing to win a Trunki ride on/pull along suitcase for kids. The event runs from 11am-4pm, so plan on stopping by 2225 Queen Anne Ave N on Saturday!

You may have come across a striking photography exhibit at the Seattle Center late last year, featuring large portraits of young entrepreneurs that are making a difference.

Looking Forward: the new heroes installation included 15 life-size portraits of young, local entrepreneurs and was commissioned as part of The Next Fifty celebration of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. If you missed it, the installation is now on view at the Washington State Convention Center through April 2nd – you have another chance to see the work of Davis Freeman, an internationally known, Queen Anne-based artist.

Davis Freeman’s work highlights 15 young social entrepreneurs from around the world via life-size portraits on brushed aluminum that celebrate their lives and work. Through these portraits, Davis’ exhibit tells the story of how these people are the “super heroes of our time”, who identify a problem, make it right, and leave a lasting positive impact. Among the images, you can also spot his signature portrait style, a triptych alongside 12 individual portraits.

The project began in July 2011 with the selection of the subjects – Davis read dozens of bios to identify the final subjects who have received recognition for their work.

The subjects in Davis’ installation include some Queen Anne connections as well – Brad Gillis and Ben Friedman are the co-owners of HomeGrown, located on the corner of Boston and Queen Anne Ave N; Lauren Burman owns Material Good, a Queen Anne-based business that sells Little Shirley ceramic vases, with proceeds supporting cancer research.

Brad Gillis and Ben Friedman Courtesy of Davis Freeman

Lauren Burman Courtesy of Davis Freeman

The exhibition is on display now through April 2, 2013 at the Washington State Convention Center (view Level 2, North Gallery, 800 Convention Place).

A new collection of portrait photographs by Gary Grenell will adorn the walls of Stacya Silverman’s Art and Beauty gallery (614 W. McGraw) beginning this Sunday with an artist’s reception from 1pm-4pm. The show, Five Blocks to Green Lake, runs from Sunday, February 3rd through April 30th and highlights people that Grenell has photographed in his own Seattle neighborhood, where he lives just 5 blocks from Green Lake park.

The black and white photographs show a variety of people who visit Green Lake, and while it’s one of Seattle’s busiest parks, the settings for many of the images are serene and peaceful, not the hustle-bustle “on your right” that a sunny, crowded day at Green Lake conjures in most Seattleites’ minds. Instead, Grenell’s series “reflects his personal vision of this very public place” as a serene and peaceful private setting.

Works from Grenell’s Green Lake series were selected for the Portland Art Museum’s Flesh and Bone: Photography & the Body exhibition that just finished its run earlier in January. The Portland Art Museum also purchased two of Grenell’s photographs for its permanent collection. Six photographs from the Green Lake series are also in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Attend the artist’s reception this Sunday from 1pm-4pm to meet the artist and see his works in person. If you have any questions about the upcoming show, contact Stacya Silverman via email or at 206.270.9465.

One of our readers, Don Rudolph, sent in this extraordinary picture he snapped of a summer night in Queen Anne last week. Take a look!

Don wrote,

Summer nights are so great in Seattle, but when a crescent moon hangs over the Olympics while Venus looks over … amazing.

Have some amazing pictures of summer (or summer nights) in Queen Anne? Share them at tips@queenanneview.com.

David Hoffman, a 17-year-old Ballard High School junior and lifelong Queen Anne resident, first picked up one of his dad’s cameras two summers ago. Though he’d never taken a photography class before, David quickly became enamored with taking pictures. “From that day forward I carried it with me every day, all summer,” he said.

Since that day almost two years ago, David has spent his spare time experimenting with photography techniques and developing a unique style. Even now, he is entirely self-taught, though you wouldn’t know it to look at his work, currently on display at Muse Coffee Co., located at 1907 10th Ave W.

“Some of these photographs I didn’t even think about–I just did them,” he said. “Most of it was experimenting and a couple of other things I read up on.”

The 13 photographs on display at Muse show some of Seattle’s most beautiful scenic views, many of which David shot right here in Queen Anne utilizing a number of techniques, including one called high dynamic range (HDR).

HDR photographs are able to show a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest elements of the image through a merging of multiple shots–David usually uses four or five–taken at different settings and then placed over one another using photography software. This allows photographers to be able to accentuate the light of the sun, the color of grass, the sky, and a scene’s shadows in one dynamic image.

Though he’s only be doing photography seriously for a year and a half, David hopes his new hobby turns into a future career; as he prepares to apply to colleges next year, David says he is looking at schools that have strong programs in his two major interests–photography and Political Science.

David’s prints are available for $80 (print only) and $150 (print with mat and frame) and will be on display at Muse through the end of the month. You can check out more of his work on his Flickr page. Every month Muse showcases a different local artist, many of which live in Queen Anne, by putting their work on display at the neighborhood coffee shop for the entire month.

(Photos courtesy of David Hoffman).

I came across this image in the Twitter-sphere this morning.

(Photo by Cathy Sullivan via her Flickr page.)

This really is a beautiful panoramic shot from the top of the hill. It’s pictures like these that make me feel very lucky to live in a such a beautiful city! Just look at that skyline…

For those of you who have perused the Seattle Weekly website over the last few days, you may have noticed a new feature pictorially highlighting the scenes and sights of Upper Queen Anne. Photographer Jenny Jimenez put together a 15-image photo essay while walking up and down Queen Anne Ave N last week. Take a look at what she saw here.

Did you know that in the United States 426,000 cell phones are tossed out every day? That 60,000 plastic bags are consumed every five seconds? How about two million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes? These are some of the questions Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan addresses in his large-scale images that most often depict American consumerism, for which he has received worldwide acclaim.

His most well-known exhibit, “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait,” (also a book), a provocative and compelling social commentary on the way we live, is opening at the Pacific Science Center this Saturday, October 3, 2009. In “Running the Numbers,” Jordan uses statistics to portray the economy, American culture and our way of life.

Many of Jordan’s works are inspired and created by photographs of garbage, a technique he picked up while visiting an industrial yard. The final product is a print assembled from thousands of smaller photographs, many of which depict specific quantities of some item, like Cans Seurat (above), which is made out of 106,000 aluminum cans, the amount consumed in the United States every 30 seconds.

“Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view  like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress,” said Jordan in a Pacific Science Center press release. “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is  a staggering complexity.”

Jordan clearly hopes to make onlookers think about their individual contribution to the American way of life with his exhibit, which is a social, but also by nature, political commentary.

Barbie Dolls (above) depicts 32,000 Barbies, representative of the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed in the United States each month in 2006.

When asked what the Pacific Science Center’s attitude was towards housing an exhibit that is not only interesting and scientific, but political by nature, President and CEO Bryce Seidl responded:

Often the numbers generated by common activities are so large they become incomprehensible to those not intimately involved in studying economics, resource utilization and consumption. In some cases, however, it is critically important for the average citizen to better understand the impact and importance of the cumulative impact of small activities that in total can only be expressed by large numbers.

We hear many statistics about consumption and waste, but they are often just numbers on a page. Chris Jordan’s work exposes some of these statistics in a powerful, visceral way. It is one thing to hear that we in the United States use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes. Seeing images that help us understand the magnitude and impact of those 2 million bottles creates an undeniable impact. By illustrating some other more unexpected examples of consumption, the Artist is asking us to examine the attitudes and beliefs behind the habits that are impacting the world we inhabit.

The exhibit is not political by nature. It is just images of what is. How one interprets this reality is personal and may become translated into political activity. It is neither our role nor intent to present a political position. It is our intent to present to the community information related to science, math, engineering and technology and to foster discussions about how these subjects are relevant to our lives today and to the future. Chris Jordan combines the eye of an artist with real data about human actions in a way that invites thoughtful discussions about the  individual and collective impacts of human activities.

Some of Jordan’s other projects include “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption,” and “In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster.” Check those out at his website.

“Running the Numbers” will be at the Pacific Science Center from Saturday, October 3, 2009 to Sunday, January 3, 2010.

Also opening at the Pacific Science Center Saturday: “Animation,” an interactive exhibit of how animation is made from concept art, to storyboarding, character design, movement, filming, timing and sound. Check out the old-time animation in the screening room and cartoon museum. Also, running through January 3, both exhibits are included in the price of admission and are free to Pacific Science Center members.