I had to drive up to Milwaukee yesterday in arguably the worst weather I've driven in some time.  It was raining quite hard and the amount of water thrown off by other cars and trucks on the highway made things all the more precarious.  Despite all this, I arrived at my destination 45 minutes prior to my meeting.  I took this opportunity to drive around downtown Milwaukee looking for compelling pictures I could make through the raindrops on my car's window.

Milwaukee Intersection © 2004 Kevin W. Hammond All Rights Reserved

This picture, Milwaukee Intersection, was taken with my 28-135mm lens at 70mm.  I used f/16 for increased sharpness through the raindrops in the window.  It was necessary to focus manually on the raindrops, less the camera attempt to focus on the background and render the raindrops invisible.  I used an ISO of 100 and adjusted my shutter until 1/8s indicated a correct exposure.

The slower shutter speed afforded me the opportunity to catch the movement of a car through the intersection as a blue and red streak, adding an additional dynamic to this picture.

Milwaukee Cow © 2004 Kevin W. Hammond All Rights Reserved

As I continued my drive through the city, I was somewhat disappointed at the lack of striking colors that I had hoped to find.  A collection of umbrellas.  Strips of neon.  Each escaped me.  However, on my way back to my meeting I found a colorful piece of artwork on the sidewalk - akin to the cows we had here in Chicago a few years back.  Taken with my 28-135mm lens at 115mm, I again used f/16 but this time at an ISO of 200 so I could use a slightly faster shutter speed of 1/15s.  This was necessary as I was taking this picture out the side window of my car and lacked anything suitable to support the camera at the slower shutter speed.

Both pictures were shot in RAW, developed with Adobe Camera RAW and saved as 16-bit TIFFs.  I used a threshold adjustment layer to find the lightest and darkest parts of the image, and curves to set the black and white points.  Hunting around in each image, I looked for a pixel that was as close to gray (128, 128, 128) as possible to set the mid tones.  I then increased the hue/saturation and brightness/contrast to taste.  Before posting to the Web, the images were resized, sharpened with a simple unsharp mask, converted to an sRGB color profile and saved as JPEGs.