At my recent Exhibition "Paris d'Esperance", this image generated the greatest reaction. The post explains why I am gratified that a difficult exercise gave rise to a deep response.

Copyrighted Digital Photograph

My dilemma

I am never without my camera wherever I go and mostly with a professional lens/body combination and a monopod. In general, I love photographing water, whether still, or in movement, but this was a dreary, wet, uncomfortably damp day. I moaned to  myself the question "But where is the beauty in this unpromising environment?" The voice in my head said "Stop moaning. Go and find it!" I set off, grumbling, and slowly realized that the best opportunity might lie in the fact that everything was so wet. I focussed in on the effects of the water: the sheen on different surfaces, reflections and the dripping, dripping, dripping environment.

Technique

As I became more focussed on the opportunities, rather than the problems, I watched the drips and where they formed and discovered the foot of the statue imaged above. The low light forced a wide aperture, which was excellent from the point of view of the bokeh effect in the background, but, even with the light addition that this offered, there was still a need for a trade off between a fast enough speed to catch the drips and a low enough ISO to maintain image quality. The "loser" in all this was ISO which was 640, higher than I usually like to use for an "art" capture.