I’ll be guest lecturing at the Duxbury Camera Club Wed. May 5th. The club meets at the Duxbury Library on Alden Street.

Trying to make images when it rains, rains and rains is tough. I find myself running out of overflowing streams and river, flooded streets to cover. I took an idea from way back and put a new spin on it. Back in the 60’s someone took an image of the Great Pyramid shot through a martini glass, part of a series for a famous vodka maker. Ok this is not the pyramid or a martini glass. I made this shot sitting in my truck at Scituate Light waiting for high tide and pounding surf.
If you look through raindrops you can see all sorts of great little images. This shot was made with a 50mm Sigma macro lens on a Canon 1D MkII. I set the focus at the minimum focus distance and moved the camera in and out to find the right point of focus. To get some depth of field a shot in “A” aperture priority set at f8.0 ISO was set at 500 to allow for a shutter speed fast enough to hand hold. The original image showed the lighthouses in the drops upside down. In Photoshop I rotated the canvas to make the lighthouses stand upright. Not a lot of tuning other than a tough of “smart sharpen”. After the rains stops there should be some good opportunity for stream and river shots. I just wish I could find a stream, which flowed more blue than brown in the area. Brown water never looks good no matter how nice the composition.
 

Last week when the sun was out I did get a chance to shoot some flowers in sunlight and the shot of the Weir River Farm’s barn in Hingham. It’s a straight shot with a 50mm lens and a polarizing filter. I only use two filters now with digital. A few years ago I might have had twenty filters in my bag for color and black and white. The polar filter just adds some great color saturation to a blue sky. ISO was 100 and the meter was set at “A” aperture priority for an f1.4 shallow depth of field. The other filter I carry is a split field graduated neutral density filter for landscapes. If rain stops someday, I may get a chance to use it.

Daylight Strobe: I’m not a huge fan of strobes, but sometimes you just can’t get the light you want when you want it. To kick off a new feature in the Ledger which will profile individuals with interesting tales I had to use strobe.
 
For the first shoot we are featuring Bob Trinque a retired Delta Airline pilot who is being sited by the FAA for having his pilot license for fifty years. Bob now flies a vintage Beech twin engine out of Plymouth Airport for fun.
 
As you can expect moving the plane around for the best light, (which was high noon light) was not much of an option. My only option was to move my light source. I found a nice angle to shoot Bob using the plane tail as a background . The story was about him, not the plane. I shot some other images of the plane as secondary shots. To put emphasis on Bob I needed to light him in a way that would draw our eyes to him first.

To do this I used a flash off camera to the left of the subject about five feet. The Canon 580 EZ with an Omni bounce diffuser was mounted on a small light stand. It was rigged wireless with a Pocket Wizard radio remote (I could have hard wired this) For exposure I wanted the background to fall off so I made test shots to get my background exposure maybe two stops under exposed. I then set the strobe to manual and adjusted the power ration (in this case ¼ power) to get the right exposure on the subjects face. The 5D synchs at 1/200 so a slow ISO rating was needed to get synched. The lens was 16-35 mm wide angles zoom. Color balance was set at cloudy to keep the colors warm.

The final images was close to as you see it with minor spotting in Photoshop.

Sorry to away from the blog I’ve had a few major projects at the paper to deal with. One of which was the “Day in the Life” project with Channel 5’s Chronicle. The response was much greater than I had expected. That’s a good thing. You folks sent some fantastic images. Given that the day was gray and rainy I was very surprised with the imagination and technical quality of the shots. As soon as I get a date for broadcast and publication I will post it here. I think I edited nearly five hundred images from readers and staff photographers from our Massachusetts papers.
 
I was glad to get out this week and start making pictures again. The snow in the sunshine this morning was a treat. I took some time to head down to Manomet Point in Plymouth at low tide to find some seals. I got to one of my favorite spots a little late on the rising tide. Only a few seals were still on the rocks, but it worked for a feature photo for tomorrow’s paper. I made the shot with a 300 2.8 and a 2X extender on a Canon 1D MkII. The sun was in and out so I had to be patient for some sun to highlight the seals faces against the dark background.
 
If the weather holds I hope to get some slow shutter shots of an area stream. The water is high after last weeks rain; maybe I’ll get lucky with some ice.
 

The newly formed Duxbury Camera Club has asked me to come and speak, which I will do once I work out my schedule. (Plymouth folks I have not forgotten you)