Dartmoor Be Damp
I’ve just been sorting through some photos I took on Dartmoor three weeks ago. It was the wettest I have ever been whilst out with my camera.
You may not know this, but taking SLRs out in the rain is not something you want to do unless a) you have a weather-sealed camera body such as Canon’s flagship 1DsIII (below left) or b) you are prepared to buy a monstrous trunk-like weatherproof Barbour coat for your camera (below right).
Respectively, these solutions come at a cost of approximately £5,000 and your dignity. Besides, neither option stops the front of your lens getting covered in water droplets, which makes any expensive gear pointless because the lens optics are screwed.
So on 6th July I decided to drive up to Dartmoor in torrential rain. Why? Because the theme of the Countryfile photo competition this year is ‘Wild and Wonderful’, and I thought that being on Dartmoor in a storm could yield some wild images, even if it meant shooting out the car window.
Several miles of country lane and several thousand oscillations of my windscreen wipers later, I was on the moor. It looked… rubbish. Flat light and dreary grey cloud everywhere; not quite the drama I was hoping for. So for a while I just kept driving, because it was raining so hard I couldn’t leave the car without drowning my camera.
The first shot of the day was this-
Canon 50D + Canon 60mm Macro lens @ f/5
Pretty plain. Still, I was beginning to wonder whether a confused sheep was going to be the most exciting subject I could find.
A little while later and the rain stopped, so I pulled up and looked for something – anything – to photograph. I came across a cool tree, with quite a nice backdrop and quite a moody sky. One problem though: the sky was far too bright and the tree was being backlit, so if I was going to capture the scene I had to take more than one exposure and merge them into an HDR image. So I set off back to the car to get my tripod, but the rain started coming down AGAIN. No choice but to run back to the tree and hand-hold the camera. Click Click Click. Better than nothing…
As with all hand-held HDR photos, it looks fine from a distance, but zoom right in and you can see the shake. But I’m not going to let you see the full size photo, so as far as you’re concerned I’m a genius-
Canon 50D + Canon 10-22mm lens @ 16mm f/8
For added effect I blended the colour version with a black & white (yellow filter) version. Quite a moody image 
Not a competition winner though. I ran to the car and waited for the rain to calm down enough so that I could see more than six feet in front of the car (really).
I discovered the next subject quite by accident, because I needed a wee.
Next to the road, hidden under trees, was a perfect opportunity to get some long exposure shots of a stream. The weather was actually perfect for this: overcast skies and wet rocks-
Canon 50D + Canon 10-22mm lens @ 16mm 0.5s
I could document the rest of the day in detail, but suffice to say that I got rained on again and again and again and once again and then again. I also fell in a stream, but it was worth it for this one-
Canon 50D + Canon 10-22mm lens @ 10mm 0.6s
As the rain finally eased off and the clouds broke up (woo), I got one last parting shot of the moor, to which I knew I would apply a Photoshop filter because the bright sky meant the rocks looked underexposed and a bit flat. I opted for the Topaz Adjust plug-in, which looks kinda cool-
Canon 50D + Canon 10-22mm lens @ 10mm f/16
So there you have it. I returned home absolutely soaking, to the extent that I would have been better off going in shorts and a T-shirt because they’re less absorbent.
Photographic Adventures | 27 July 2009 |
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By Neal, July 27, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
Some awesome photos there!
By Chris, July 27, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
shot of the day was definitely the one you fell in the stream for. That’s a competition winner, and the saturation of the colours is great-good lighting obviously. The sheep looks superimposed – did you shoop this?
I like the B&W one, but not the colour temperture you went for; the blue makes it feel a little artificial, but obv only IMO.
Have u thought about a plastic bag? It’s what I used for my video camera in alaska…
By Jamie, July 27, 2009 @ 11:39 pm
It’s Chris!
Yeah I’ve used plastic bags before. Don’t trust them in *real* rain though. Maybe drizzle.
And no the sheep is not shopped! That was straight out the camera. Odd light
By Joe, July 28, 2009 @ 10:59 am
My personal favourite is the sheep portrait. The indifferent expression helps to bring out a moodiness in the shot that complements the quite clearly threatening skies. Thanks for sharing.