Yes, it's a dark image... it was taken in the dark so what would you expect!
If it would have been a month of so later and 10 degrees colder the storm that passed through yesterday and last night probably would have been our first winter storm of the season. Fortunately, that didn’t happen which is a good thing since we really don’t seem to have a problem with getting our share of winter storms up here in the Keweenaw.
The images I have on display here were taken with practically zero light. There wasn’t much light to begin with most of the day, but by the time Lori and I got out to the breakers at the North Entry Point of the Portage Canal the light was pretty much non-existent. It was pouring down rain, but I figured I would at least try to see if I could get some video from outside the truck, however heavy rain and 40 to 50 mph gusts meant that was pretty much useless. Time to get back into the truck to thaw out my hands and end the soaking my jeans were taking (I had a rain jacket on, but that didn’t help my jeans).
We sat in the truck watching the power of the storm as it generated huge white capped waves onto the shoreline. Once in a while a few of the waves would get in sync and water would almost come up the the rocks at the edge of the parking area. Of course the waves were pretty much consuming the break wall at the entry of the canal. It was too awesome a spectacle to not try to capture it somehow so some serious thought went into action.
Because the light was so low I needed to mount the camera on a tripod. The problem is that outside it’s a monsoon so I wasn’t going out there. Then I remembered that the legs on my tripod could be splayed out independently of each other so after a few minutes of trying various combinations I was able to get one leg in the front cup holder, the other in the back cup holder and the other on the driver side arm rest. Hey, that works!
Now that I have a stable platform I can try some long exposure shots which will give me a chance to get something. It turned out that I needed 6 seconds at ISO 3200 to even get some sort of image. Now the only problem was that the 40 to 50 mph wind gusts would actually shake the truck so even though my tripod had secure footing I really didn’t have a stable platform, but it was the best I could do so I proceeded to see what I could get.
The resulting images are far from high quality, there is no way to get a sharp image when your truck is being buffeted by wind gusts, but they do give one an idea of what was happening. Also, keep in mind that it was dark so the images are not going to pop off the screen. They do look pretty much representative of what we saw while out there.
To get as much light as possible I had the ISO turned all the way up on my Canon 40D. The resultant images were going to be rather noisy especially considering how dark it was in the first place. I ran the images through Noiseware Professional which is a noise reduction plug-in for Photoshop. That took out the really bad stuff, but nothing could save the shake caused from the truck moving in the wind gusts, but my goal was to capture what I saw out there and given the extreme conditions I guess it served its purpose.
