Personal Experiences Page 3

The images on this page deal mostly with lens problems.

Flare Wave: I was making a trip around Terceira with a friend when we happened to find this rocky sea front area. The constant action of the waves on the rocks drew my attention so I composed and shot this image at a slow shutter speed. I think I took this at 1/15 second using Tv mode and hand held because I wanted to get just enough of a blur in the waves to show their motion. It was late in the afternoon, too, and what I failed to successfully block out was that huge flare coming in from the corner. This is why lens shades were invented. But I didn't use one. I remember trying to angle the lens away from the sun enough to eliminate flare but, as you can see, I was not successful. You could argue that the bright flare adds to the image, and I actually do see how it does, but it wasn't the effect that I was trying to produce. Your eyes as well as the eyes of the viewer never produce flare so I automatically get a sense of falseness when I see flare in an image. A flare, in my opinion, makes it blatantly obvious that the image is artificially produced and lessens the sense of actually being there that some photographs invoke in the viewer. Therefore, I never want flare in my photographs of nature. The only time I would intentionally attempt to get lens flare is in the production of abstract images or as a special effect. Photo data: Canon Elan II in Tv with Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8EX hand held.

Flattery Flare: I shot this picture on my first and only trip to Cape Flattery, the Northwestern-most point in the Continental US. It truly is a beautiful area and the afternoon that I spent there had a misty morning feel to it. For this picture, the sun was barely out of the frame and I caught its rays streaming through the trees on the far cliff and casting shadows onto the mist coming up from the ocean. It truly was a beautiful location and time. I set up my 70-200mm lens on the tripod and composed this shot carefully. But I got lazy before tripping the shutter and didn't put the lens shade on the lens. I didn't even notice that big, purple flare in the bottom middle of the picture until I got the slides back. I think this image has a great, serene quality to it. Too bad there's a big purple stain-like thing in the bottom portion! I suppose someday I could digitally modify the colors in this area to bring them back to how they were before the flare, but I should have fixed this problem before snapping the shutter. Photo data: Canon Elan II and Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8EX lens on a tripod in Av mode.

Wet Lens Wave: This is a powerful photograph that illustrates the awesome strength of the sea. Unfortunately and undesirably, it also illustrates the strength of the wind in blowing pieces of that very sea onto the front of my lens! I love every aspect of this photograph, except for the blurry spots of water on the front of the lens. I scared my wife nearly to death while composing this image because I was perched on the edge of a 200 foot cliff in 70 mile per hour wind gusts over what you can obviously see were extremely rough seas. In fact, in the two years I lived in the Azores I never did see a storm worse than the one pictured in this photograph! What a powerful moment to capture on film. But, foolish me (not so much for where I was but for what I didn't do while I was there), I didn't wipe the lens front clear of the water being blown on me before taking the picture. I have found in the past that lens shades work great at keeping precipitation off of lens front elements. In this circumstance, however, the wind was so strong that I don't believe even the deep shade that comes with the 70-200mm lens I was using would have been able to keep the sea water droplets from reaching the front element. Bottom line, I should have wiped the lens clean first. Photo data: Canon Elan II and Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8EX lens in Tv mode hand held.

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