Yesterday was an exciting day here in Maine, not just because it’s “shower day” (a nearly weekly event), but because we had quite a little snowstorm. Not unheard of this time of year, but most certainly unwelcome. In response to a snapshot of my yard that I posted on social media at the height of it all, a friend of mine commented with this GIF from Gran Torino.
Perfect.
Anyway, I was excited because of the possibility of getting that iconic shot of “stuff with snow on it that never has snow on it (SWSOITNHSOI), such as daffodils and, in this case, lilac buds. Well, along with the snow came wind strong enough to blow my hat off. I headed out into it anyway, hoping to get, something or…anything.
The result is that I got two mediocre images, that look nice here on your phone, but don’t pass the pixel test, if you know what I mean. Here are the issues: I was forced into using a very high ISO (800, hence, there is some noise), I still couldn’t get a high enough shutter speed to freeze the movement (1/320), and I had to use an aperture that just didn’t quite give me the focus I wanted (somewhere around f/8). Ideally, for shots like this, you want it perfectly still so you can screw around with your settings and then even toss in a focus stack or two. The first image is a dead-on snapshot barely worth Instagram, and even after much tweaking in Photoshop I was disappointed. I went back out, rather dejected, but wanting to try again before the trees were blown clean. The second shot is much better, if only because the howling gale gave me a few moments of pause. And I do like the frozen droplet on the end (which was all I focused on, BTW, having totally given up on any real depth of field).
So, there you go: a great opportunity not quite capitalized on. It’s as if a great 15th century explorer set out to find New Jersey, and only got as far at the Azores. (Come to think of it, if you discovered the Azores, why in the world would you continue on to New Jersey?)
Metadata as described above, and no flickr versions (the pics are just not that good, folks).
