The Story Behind the Photo:

June 2021: Rainy Day

by Roger Young

A TALE OF TWO PROCRASTINATIONS

What do you do when you wait until after the last rainy day to take your rainy-day photos?

June 14th was the last day with measurable precipitation in the Seattle area.

Contest ended Sunday June 20th.

Meeting Thursday June 24th.

As of June 20th I had not done a good rainy-day photo for the contest.

So I punted.

I set up my sprinkler in the driveway at 11PM on Sunday night, because if you are going to procrastinate, go for the gold. I put the flag on a light stand and set up three flashes, two behind and one in front of the flag. Then experimented with shutter speeds, I started at 1/400 and continued to drop all the way down to 2 seconds. The longer exposure did not lead to very long drops as the actual flash was so fast, but the longer shutter speed did allow some drops that are not lit by the flash, but rather lit by the streetlight behind them.

As you can see from the photo on the left, there are two light stands one with the flag and the other with a flash, a second flash is visible on the ground. The third flash was on my camera, the one on my camera triggered the other two.

This image shows how the sprinkler looked to me.
My end photo was taken with a 300mm lens (to get shallow DOF), ISO 400, f6.7, 2 second SS.

So, if you miss the natural opportunity to get Rain, you can make your own, I suggest you don’t wait quite this long. It is the way you tell your story online that can make all the difference.

The second procrastination was that I waited until after our July meeting to turn this in.