Serendipity Now

I mentioned I try to carry my camera with me wherever I go. This is not because I necessarily lead this ultra-exciting life where lions, tigers, and bears are on parade every day [note: if only!], but that if you do carry your camera every day, you find yourself seeking out things that make justify lugging it around all worth it. After a while, you start noticing things you didn't see before -- or, blind chance and old man Bayes puts you in the right place at the right time.

Today, I've got three shots to show that only happened because I had my camera with me All the Time:



I left the office late one day, and the sky was on fire. Saw nothing before or like it since then. I reached into my bag, slapped on my Sigma 10-20mm, and then ran to my car, only to discover I'd left my tripod at home. What then? The sweet spot for the composition was at 20mm, which meant I "ought" to be shooting at around 1/30th of a second. Unfortunately, at iso 1600, the camera was telling me that I needed 1/4th of a second. Just over two stops slower -- not a great result.

So, I used two tricks I've learned when I'm in low light, and need to shoot sharp(ish):

- I leaned against a tree
- I shot in continuous mode

My experience is that the tree is like a poor man's monopod. For a small tree, I find you can get about a stop's worth of shutter speed leaning against it -- larger trees where you can really nestle in between branches might get you more, but I pay a clumsy tax. Continuous shooting is less reliable -- I can generally squeeze out a one third to one stop advantage in shutter speed, but it's pushing your luck.

In this case, I was able to get something relatively sharp (it being clouds and bushy trees silhouetted helped!), and managed to capture that crazy sky.



This is actually shot in the same place as the previous image, in that period of time after sunset that I call the 'Blue Period'. The sunset has set, and absent any reflecting clouds, the sky turns a deep, deep blue -- I love it! Unfortunately, you really need to have a tripod, or (modulo brightness) a steady hand and a camera that looks good at ISO 1600+.

The reason why I took this photo was because the foreground was illuminated by a parking lot light, ensuring that the foreground wouldn't just be this dark blah area -- and the sky has the below-the-horizon sun to illuminate it. Plus, you've got these trees with the vivid green leaves, quasi-framing the blue sky. And, if you shoot it on a tripod for 25 seconds, it looks like you're on a medium-budget alien word on Star Trek.

I got off three exposures for this shot, and then the parking light flickered off, and the sprinklers came out -- had just packed up my camera and nearly got wet. So, not only did I only get it because I happened to have my camera, if I hadn't stopped and taken it right then I would have missed it. Carpe Photographum and all that.



My company runs a shuttle service between offices in San Francisco and the peninsula, and one day I took the shuttle to SF. At the same time, California is, um, on fire. Not the place where I live, but there are zillions of fires all around me, puffing soot in the air. Net result? Some really weird, gray skies during the day. The sun is just a smidge warmer and dimmer, and you occasionally get some crazy things happening like the sun turning blood red for the last few hours of the day. In this case, I was on the way home, and I saw the sun peeping through these gray clouds (which I assume were laced with things like soot and ash). I wanted to get a shot of the guy sitting next to this window peering out through it, sort of a 'dude gazes out in horror over post-apocalyptic San Bruno', but being as I was bouncing up and down and frequently clueless, I under-exposed the guy and overexposed the window a smidge. Thankfully, it was fixable in post -- and I love the shot precisely because it is so weird.