Esoteric Photography in Unexpected Places
After a full day of balancing work with shoveling snow I grabbed my camera and a long lens and began taking some photos as the sun peaked out from behind the passing storm in late afternoon. Fresh snowfall always has such a pristine look about it, but unfortunately that doesn't always translate to great photos. What I captured looked like photos of my neighborhood under piles of snow. Neat, but hardly interesting. But the low sun angle was perfect and I was determined to find some way of using that light to my advantage, so help me God!
After trying several shots I just wasn't thrilled with I accepted defeat and retreated out of the cold and back inside through the garage. When I did something caught my eye as I moved to the front of one of our cars. It had been bravely driven by my son earlier in the day during the storm and all that snow had now melted to water droplets of varying shapes and sizes across the top of the glass roof. The low sun was backlighting them all and the glass roof seemed to act as a mirror; creating interesting shapes and light across the surface.
So, I began shooting them at a relatively close distance knowing that the not-so-ideal lens I was using would have a very shallow depth of field at the 400mm focal length I was using and would render the foreground and background out of focus. So I played with different angles and heights to try to render these water droplets in a way that was not quite so obvious. The result was some shots having an almost oil-in-water look to them. The blue sky and the orange glow of the sun were offering up some nice complimentary colors to work with around the water droplets, so I kept trying new angles.
Now these are no award winning photos by any stretch of the imagination. But it goes to show that if you look around hard enough you can often find new things to shoot that you would otherwise never consider, and maybe even get something interesting out of the effort!
The three photos below are examples of what I captured.
