that's an awesome picture, i dunno what you're talking about.

I think the picture looks cool. But you could try a slower exposure speed, but then you'll have to hold the camera really still and/or use a tripod. The lights will be a lot brighter. You could fiddle with f-stops too. I know you have a really good digital camera, so you can do a lot of manual adjustments on it.

The image was taken with a tripod, f/5 and .5s shutter. I thought this would be adequate, but there is still a lot of blurring (check the top of the space needle in the full version).

Any specific suggestions?

I tried to take that exact picture over the summer :). I also tried to take pictures from Alki beach one night. I found that on days where it was windy, it is just impossible to get the camera steady, so you need to make sure it is a still night before you even go out. Using a timer at night is also very helpful (your camera definitely comes with one...). If you use the timer, then you avoid any camera shake (which you can't avoid if you are touching the tripod at all...). You can also buy a wireless remote to do this for about ~$20 (which I did because I thought it would be cool to have for fireworks, where you don't really want to b e waiting on a timer). Finally, I think taking a variety of pictures (some with exposures up to a minute) is always a good idea... it's really hard to tell which ones came out until you get it back home on your monitor.