703 - Complicated Relations

Monday began with a light drizzle, just enough that I felt compelled to take out my umbrella, but not enough that I used the rain cover on my LowePro backpack. From then on it went only down 🙂

Having been in a hurry in the morning, I was in the bad position to not have a single usable image, and when I left work in the afternoon, it was broodingly dark with heavy rain.

In such cases I sometimes go home and shoot some Chess or Go pieces (or both), but most of the time I try to get something anyway. So I did this Monday afternoon.

It’s funny how conditioned we are. All the time we hear that a rainy day is “Bad Weather”, but of course this is not entirely true, at least not when you go photographing. In fact, there is a lot to like in rainy days. Well, at least I tell myself so, because it’s predicted to go on that way for the rest of the week 🙂

When walking around under an umbrella, it is convenient to use a physically short, light lens, thus I mounted the Nikon 50/1.8 before leaving work. I like that cheap lens. It is of high quality, sharp as a razor and easily the best value for any photographer.

When shooting in rain, it is always a good idea to consider a polarizer, because it gives you the opportunity to cut out much of the glare, but in this case I wanted to show off the rain, thus a polarizer would have been counterproductive and it would have been much more prone to catch rain drops than the recessed front element of the 50/1.8.

I finally settled with the last image that I shot on my 20 minutes walk around six blocks: the jumble of bicycles, a complication of eight ellipses.

The Song of the Day is “Why So Complicated?” from San Francisco based Jazz pianist and Afro-Cuban band leader Omar Sosa’s 2000 album “Prietos”. I have no lyrics and the sound sample does not prove it, but the only line sung is the title anyway.