16 thoughts on “Photo: Night Rain Shower Over Port of Miami”

  2. I think this is wonderful, but I have to ask if you won’t take offense please. Has this been photoshopped at all and when was it taken.

    The answer I hope for is NO it’s not and yesterday.

  5. Thanks for the nice comments.

    Gene: I photoshop most of my photos to correct color, increase contrast, crop, etc. I think what you are asking is whether the photo is real, and the answer is yes. I took it last Thursday night.

    Here is how the photo looked as it came from the camera:

  6. Let me elaborate further. This was a ten-second exposure, so what you see is cumulative rainfall over ten seconds. It’s real, but it’s not the same thing that the naked eye would see, or that a camera making a much shorter or longer exposure would see. Still, it’s not so different in appearance (as my imperfect memory remembers it) from what I remember seeing. It was such a striking visual event that as soon as I noticed it (I was bicycling along an esplanade) I decided that I should stop at once to photograph it before it disappeared.

  7. I wish you’d stop posting these great photos. Each time you do, my spouse starts pestering me for an expensive camera.

  11. Great Shot Jonathan.

    Gene: In fairness to Jonathan, I think you need to understand better the relationship between image and reality. In the analogue era, the image making process involved the photographer’s choice of subject, camera, lens, focus, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, film, developer and development, printing (paper, enlarger, focus, exposure, development) to produce an image. The digital era changes some of the steps, especially on the back end. So instead of developing and printing, we now have raw and jpeg and photoshop.

    The image may appear to be artless or artful, but it was and is always the result of a conscious artistic process. If you can remember that, you will be more able to appreciate the photographer’s art, and less likely to be misled by propaganda photography.

  13. Actually, I put the camera on top of a concrete post.

    You were lucky to find a flat one. I’ve successfully taken pictures at night by setting the camera on top of a garbage can. There were bees in my hair.

    Generally, though, I manage to screw it up somehow.

    I stopped worrying (much) about whether I was doing too much photo fiddling when I noticed the differences between slides, and prints made from slides, and scans made from slides, and prints made from scans of slides, and…well, you get the idea.

    I still try to keep the fiddling down to the bare minimum necessary. I have to rein myself in on the color saturation.

  14. Ha, it wasn’t flat, merely slightly domed. Better than nothing. In my area the best posts have truncated pyramidal tops that are reasonably flat. I get bird droppings on myself rather than bees.

    Maybe the people who scanned your Hawaii photo were accustomed to negatives and didn’t know to do basic color adjustment to a slide scan.

    Of course we’re assuming color photos. With B&W film the mapping of colors to shades of grey is somewhat arbitrary.

    Robert’s comment puts it well.

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