Rainy Day Vibes

New work! Well sort of… it’s late October and the weather in my part of the world starts shifting from late summer into autumn. The air gets a little more crisp, the sun begins to fade away and the rain starts to settle in… Most of the time living in Ontario, Canada in the fall is an amazing time and place to be as the leaves on the trees start changing into a kaleidoscopic array of colours. It is absolutely beautiful and perfect for photography!

But today we are talking about the rainy day vibes. I was running around the city doing mundane errands trying to find somewhere to pull out the camera and see if I could find something, anything to photograph without getting soaked in the relentless autumn rain. I was all about to give up on the photo mission when I remembered the covered walking bridge that goes over the highway not far from my house. It should be good for something. I think I had about 10 minutes before I had to be somewhere else for the day so I pulled out my ahem digital camera… The Nikon D7000, a bit of a beast but it was done me well for the last decade more or less. Attached to it is an older Nikon 24-120mm lens. The one that has a maximum aperture of 5.6 or something silly. It’s big and heavy with a substantial amount of glass but it is a good fit for the digital dx camera. It gives me a pretty decent focal range of about 35-180mm.

Snap snap snap, taking some quick shots. A few long exposures trying really hard to get some motion blurs of cars zooming down the highway but quickly maxing out the capabilities of the camera. That was it 10 minutes and I was gone.

I found a bit of time later to import the images into Lightroom CC and found some interesting compositions with some less then stellar colours and pretty flat colours (it was raining and I was shooting in a tunnel). However I had somehow managed to blur a few shots and that made me happy and there was this little spot of yellow at the end of the tunnel..

It didn’t take long in Lightroom for me to find one of my presets that made the images pop! I got the colour and contrast that I need and ended up with some moody rainy day images. It turned out to be a good day for photos after all. The lesson here is simple, keep your camera close because you never know what you will stumble upon even on those mundane rainy days.