Water Gives you Wings

Drink water. Also, puddles are fun and I wish I could fly.

Living in the north west, it rains quite a bit. On San Juan, it's not as bad as some places like Seattle, but there's still quite a lot of moisture. This week has been one of the wettest in  a while. It rained pretty much the whole day, and so the puddles were, well...how should I phrase this..


SIZE: EPIC

Basically, they were a small pond size. Not that deep, but enough to really have some volume in them. More importantly, more than enough to really create some epic water splashes. Victor, Maclin and I went down to the secret puddle location, and made some photos happen.

I took the ol' p.bike, which I haven't ridden in almost a year now. It needs a good rebuild anyway, so I figured it'd be fine to give it a nice bath....

The lighting set up was pretty simple really, just two strobes on either side set to a high power. The strobes side/back lit the water, and really made it stand out. The background and foreground was left black, with only the reflection in the water. Not the most flattering light for portraits, but for action shots it's one of my favorites. Really brings out drama in things.

I shot at f/8 to get a decent depth of field since I wasn't quite sure where the picture would be taken. I was moving pretty fast on the bike, so the focus could fall in and out pretty quickly. In fact, the final photo isn't actually sharp, but it's really close.

I also shot at ISO500, to help the strobes out little bit. They were pretty far away from me, and with the higher aperture they didn't have a lot of power.

Victor was the one who pushed the shutter, so it was up to him to decide when. I've shot with him a lot, so he could time a photo like this pretty well.

Editing started by just doing basic contrast and exposure correction. The exposure needed to go up a little bit, actually a lot. The LCD really does not tell the truth...Next, I switched to b/w, and then I was done.

I also cropped things down a little bit, but to tighten it up. Not too much, but cropping can make a world of difference.

See you tomorrow!