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.

Reflective Flood © 2004 Kevin W. Hammond All Rights Reserved

The Des Plaines river here in Chicago is in the process of flooding.  We've had some substantial rain over the past few days and many who live within the flood plain are simply waiting for the inevitable at this point.  The last time the river flooded was back in '87.  Given this, I headed out to take a look first hand and spend a little time documenting the event.

My first stop was along River Road, just north of Higgins, at a little forest preserve pull-in.  The water level was within 20' of the parking lot.  Bathed in shadow and green foliage, it was pretty cool to see.  Fortunately, the water was pretty still allowing me to get this reflective picture.  Reflective Flood was taken with my

Astute Statement of the Obvious © 2004 Kevin W. Hammond All Rights Reserved

28-135mm lens at 135mm.  I used an aperture of f/8 as the trees were on the same focal plane and adjusted my shutter speed until 1/15s indicated a correct exposure.  f/16 or f/22 would have afforded a greater depth of field and possibly a sharper image, but I would have had to trade ISO (resulting in more noise) or shutter speed (resulting in more shake, even with image stabilization.)  Unfortunately my tripod wasn't with me and 1/15s was the best I could do handholding and with image stabilization.

I carried on up River Road to the railroad tracks where the clearance is known to be 9' to see how high the water level truly had risen.  In this picture, Astute Statement of the Obvious, it is clear once again that the government is trying to protect us from ourselves.  For this picture, I zoomed my 28-135mm lens out to 70mm.  I was using an aperture of f/22 to maximum depth of field as I shot under the bridge.  I adjusted my shutter speed until 1/60s at ISO 400 indicated a correct exposure and fired away.

We were lying on the couch watching Sleeping Beauty around 7:45 or so this evening, when Chloe looked out the window and said, “Daddy, it’s getting dark.” I looked up and there was an amazing orange cast outside. I ran to grab my camera and stepped outside into a Martian-like landscape: the sunset reflecting off of the storm clouds had bathed the entire neighborhood in an eerie orange glow.

Stormy © 2004 Kevin W. Hammond All Rights Reserved

This picture, Stormy, posted here was taken with my 28-135mm lens at 115mm.  I used f/22 for maximum depth of field and manually focused the lens at infinity.  I adjusted my camera's meter until a shutter speed of 1/80s indicated a correct exposure.

What really struck me as odd is this picture I grabbed of a cloud that was a beautiful white above, and an ominous orange below.  Amazingly, the storm missed us on both the north and the south side, but did yield some fantastic views of the thunder storm that captivated our attentions for well over half-an-hour.  Unfortunately, I don't yet have the knack for capturing lightning, but I did prove to myself once again that if you hold the shutter open long enough, you can make low-light surroundings look just like broad daylight!