Timing Is Everything

Two shots, five minutes apart...huge difference in appearance because the sun moved

A lucky break in the clouds

The weather in Seattle has been awful, to say the least: very little sun, cooler than you’d expect for summer (low 60s), and a lot of rain.

I caught a break yesterday evening; no sun, but at least the rain had let up for a few hours. I cleaned my lenses, and put together a reasonable kit for shooting Evans Creek again.

Kit: 32mm Schneider lens mounted in the WRS-5000 technical camera (provides tilts and shifts) with Phase One IQ3 100 digital back, shutter cable, special cable to pre-trigger the digital back, neutral density filter, tripod, and a few 35mm lenses and the Sony α1 for play after the main effort with the technical camera.

I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the technical camera: shift the lens down to capture more of the creek without having to tilt the camera downward. Tilts cause distortion (vertical lines get bent); shifts don’t. So you get a more natural look with a shift. The above image was made with a 15mm downward shift.

(This of the lens as projecting a cone of light backwards into the camera - a shift moves the sensor to a different position, ideally still within that cone. Most cameras do not give you the ability to do a shift; the cone of light for the lenses on those camera is just big enough to cover the sensor. A technical camera uses lenses with much wider cones of light, so you can shift the sensor around to pick the part of the image you want to record.)

The sunlight makes this image; I had been shooting under gray skies and suddenly the sun broke through. I had been taking 2-minute images (plus a 2-minute dark frame to clean up the noise), and just as I finished one of those the sun broke through. I quickly estimated the exposure time as 30 seconds, and took a shot - by the time I had taken the 30-second dark frame, the sun was gone. Perfect timing!

A less intense sun broke through two more times, also briefly, and this shot above, a 45-second one, was my favorite.

Here is a typical no-sun image with the same setup.

Same creek, but no sun streaming in.

It’s a nice photo, but…the sun makes the top one my favorite.