Last night I got to shoot with two really great guys: Scott Eccleston and Mark Hensley. It had been gray and very overcast all day, and by the time they picked me up (around 4:00 pm) it was already starting to rain. They asked if I wanted to postpone the shoot and try for another day, and I said, “No way—let’s just shoot something that looks good in bad weather.” I asked if there where any creeks or streams nearby, and Scott knew of one near his home–an old mill with a small waterfall, so we headed there.
What’s great about shooting streams in weather like this is that the dark skies overhead, combined with the shade from the trees, force your shutter to stay open longer to make a proper exposure, which gives you that silky water effect (like you see in the photos shown here). In Aperture Priority mode, I set my Aperture to f/22 which made the camera give me shutter speeds anywhere from about 4 seconds to 13 seconds long (the longer the shutter stays open, the silkier the water gets). The other benefit of shooting in light rain, or ideally just after it, is that the rocks look much better when wet, and the color of the foliage looks much more saturated and colorful when wet, too.
We had a great time, and I made two new friends (who are both top-notch photographers). We might shoot together again this weekend at some of the locations we planned on going to before we got rained out (on our way to the second location, it started pouring and we called it a day). My thanks to Scott and Mark for their gracious hospitality and for sharing their wonderful mill stream with me. :-)
Lots of posts today (four big ones), including my Friday News Wrap-up, so scroll on down, bunky! :-)
