Some Rainy Downtown Shots

It was raining last night, with no wind... so I had to take advantage.  I got pretty wet, but kept my camera dry.  I was fairly happy with the shots, although some of them are a bit cluttered.  I guess that's the nature of shooting in the rain, I can't really take as much time (or posses as much dexterity) as I might like.



Despite the conditions, I managed to get a good sixty shots, and from those I had a dozen or so I liked.  Of course, half of those duplicated the other half, but it really helped being able to pick out the one that was straighter.  I had some real trouble keeping things level, as with the rain and umbrella and all, I didn't take as much time setting up the camera as usual.



One thing that always surprises me with my night shots is the extraneous clutter that I don't see when I am out shooting.  In the shot above, for example, all of those signs on the side of the street... I didn't even notice them when I was out.  Of course, with it being dark and all, I'm not sure I could have even seen them if I had known to look.  Looking through the viewfinder for these, all I really can see clearly is the lights.



I tried to play around a little with the zoom and whatever, it makes it pretty tough to get different angles when you can only stand so far out into the street.  Most of these were shot from in front of a parked car... which is why they all seem to have the edge of another car in the bottom right corner.



Finally, I headed to a parking garage I had visited a couple of months ago.  I remember saying that I would come back in the rain next time... and I did!  Good for me.

I hope you've enjoyed!

Some Jewelry Macros

I was asked to take pictures of some very nice jewelry recently, and of course I was happy to help out.  These were some great pieces to work with, and I learned a lot while I was doing the little shoot.






Most of these images have had some modification... there were bits of hair, crumbs, and so forth that snuck into the photos and I had to black them out.  On one or two you can see a tiny hair on the jewelry, I couldn't do much about that.  I had to brighten a few of them too, I'm terrible at accommodating for indoor work.  






I think I did a good job overall, I had the white balance right and good focus on almost all of them.  Doing all this macro work reminded me of why I love that lens, but also why I need to stay in practice with it.  It has it's quirks.

A Few Wet Industrial Shots

Over the weekend, we had plenty of rain here in Portland. On Saturday, the rain let up a bit, and I decided it would be a great day to head over to the industrial area and see if I could round up anything interesting. Plus, I wanted to try out the new tripod base that my parents had bought me for Christmas. Yes, I would once again have a tripod where one leg didn't tend to slowly collapse upon itself. That really helps.



I did manage to find a couple of good shots at the first place I stopped. However, the wind picked up soon after I arrived, and was blowing the misty rain about in gusts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well with the umbrella... it either blows the rain around it, or tries to blow the umbrella away.

I tried to wait it out, but the weather only got nastier the longer I waited. Which was too bad, because it really is nice when things are already wet down and I don't have to mess with the spray bottle. I guess there's always next weekend.



I also received a response from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines this morning. They won't compensate me for the image that they would like to use. However, they only wanty to use an image that I don't really care much about at all. So I've decided to let them use it. I am really surprised that they wanted it... although I guess it does have a good photojournalistic style to it.