50/50 shot
I took quite a few days off the 1st two weeks of May for my annual spring vacation. Laying them adjacent or sandwiched between days off gave me lots of consecutive days off to work with. Quite useful as I was trying out not one but two new camera’s and needed lots of free time to test them out. And try them out I did, each free day traveling to a new location to test them out in.
However we always have lots of non vacation tasks that need to be taken care of, and as the weathermen predicted a day filled with rain most of the time, I chose to use this day off to handle some of those on my list.
One thing on my to do list was to travel into the city to the lower tip of Manhattan and drop off a package I was returning to Amazon.com. Even though it was supposed to pour rain numerous times throughout the day, that still didn’t deter me from grabbing one of my camera’s and a couple of lenses and putting them into the medium sized camera bag most ideally suited for holding them as well as my package bound for the UPS store.
Great shots know no weather restrictions, as long as you or your equipment don’t conk out first. And I envisioned getting one great shot today in which the weather conditions made the shot.
Ready from the get go I took shots as I boarded the ferry, even though I knew there was a great chance for the washed out sky to create a large chunk of negative space in my shots, hoping instead that there would be enough grey brooding clouds somewhere in the scene that I could punch up the sky with a little in post. I saw none as I captured my series boarding the boat, and didn’t figure I’d even bother editing any of them because of it (I was surprised that I liked the shot you see previous to this one, so much that I ended up editing it anyway despite the ugly featureless sky – and no I didn’t consider lying my way through the shot and pasting on in a better looking sky in Photoshop, that was what the day really looked like, that is how I chose to display it).
I had another chance when the boat slipped out of the dock of shots of the rain hitting the deck, but didn’t like any of them. Had another chance as the ferry pulled out of St. George with the Verrazano bridge behind a docked ferry, ehh – not great, didn’t even go through with editing it.
One more opportunity. Standing outside on the back of the boat on the lowest deck I looked around for something interesting to shoot. Nothing looked good out in the bay, so I turned my attention to the people around me, specifically to the pair that I let have the left corner of the deck, rather than crowd them by going to the edge and peer out the opening.
Well as my gut told me the odds were small anything far away would be interesting enough to shoot, I left my 70-300mm, nice and dry inside my camera bag, before stepping outside, and had my all purpose 17-70mm attached instead. Perfect if these two did anything interesting enough to warrant capturing on film.
Having taking this trip a million times before over the last 30 years I knew exactly when the boat would be at the ideal location to get the Verrazano bridge perfectly framed for the shot I was envisioning. As well as where I needed to stand to compose father and son in the foreground to balance the shot, and as I walked over to that spot I stopped my lens aperture down two stops to f5.6, to give me just the right amount of blur to the bridge, wonderfully veiled in fog in the distance. (It turned out my F-stop choice wasn't so perfect. But thank Nik software for coming to the rescue for the thousandth time.)
After that I just waited. If they stayed put for a few moments more, all the elements would be in place and at that point either they were or weren't going to do anything worth photographing. So I figured my odds were 50/50. Those are odds worth taking every time when it comes to candid photography.
A moment later they leaned towards each other so they could hear each other talk above the roar of the ferry engine and pounding waves, just as the bridge nestled into the perfect spot in the background. Looking through my view finder I knew I hit the jackpot.
