Old Dog Photography

Today’s picture serves both as a travel shot, and a warning:

This is an image from this summer on our Alaska trip — it’s of a fishing dock in Ketchikan, Alaska.

If you were wondering how I got that nice foggy, misty feel in the image — it’s not post processing. Getting this look in your images is simple:

• Start out on a cold, wet day — inside someplace warm (I started in the passenger cab of a tour boat).
• Then, without doing anything to your camera, just step outside.

You see, I’ve started upgrading to Oly’s upper-tier glass (in no small part because it’s splash-proof) while trying to save up the money for an E-3 — or more likely (by the time I’ve saved up the money) for whatever follows the E-3. Meanwhile, I’ve been using a nylon and plastic camera bag to protect my camera on those uncommon occasions when I’m taking shots in the rain.

So on one leg of our Alaska trip, we were taken to see some sights in a van, then brought back to Ketchikan by boat. The weather was cool (mid-40’s F) with a light, sporadic rain. All my shots on land turned out just fine, but once we got on the boat my shots got progressively more foggy. I didn’t notice that this was going on at the time because the back of the camera cover was all fogged up from condensation, so I thought the hazy look of the shots on the camera LCD was just due to the cover. It wasn’t until we were back on shore that I could pull the camera out of the cover and look at the camera’s LCD up close.

The pictures were still foggy. I took a few indoor shots — foggy, too.

At this point I was pretty sure that water had made it inside the camera and trashed it, so I carefully took off the lens to look inside — the guts of the camera looked fine. I held the lens up to a light and looked through it — foggy.

I was a bit steamed myself at this point — how had water made it inside Oly’s “splashproof” lens? It was only when I put the lens back on the camera that I noticed what was really causing the problem. I always keep a UV filter on my lenses, just as extra protection against scratching up the front element. The lens was sealed against water, but the threads between the filter and lens weren’t — I pulled off the filter and found it was completely fogged. Somewhat less condensation had built up on the front element of the lens, but a light puff of breath dried it off.

So here’s my small contribution to the lore of photography — if you’re going to shoot in cold, wet conditions (particularly if you’re going to spend any part of the time in a warmer place), take off your UV filter!