Dave,
How do you protect your camera in rain and wind? Thanks!
Hi Scott, good question..
The simple answer is, that I use everything I can and is available to me at the time, you know things such as a brolly if it isn't too windy, or raising the hatchback of the car and sheltering under that, or a plastic bag with a hole cut into it etc., but for this particular image and under these fairly hostile conditions, I used the car itself as a shelter.
So what I did when I arrived at this view, was to find a parking area and then drive around within it, until I could get the vehicle into the best position where the driving rain and wind, were hitting the car mainly on the passenger rear side corner, but I still had a clear view of the scene - which of course you can't always do, so this method depends entirely on the wind direction to work, but for this shot it did line up nicely. I then put on my 70/200 zoom with its lens hood, set the IS to On and auto-focus, then set my shutter speed and ISO into a combo that allowed me to shoot with as fast a shutter speed as I could get. I then leaned over into the passenger space of the vehicle as far as I could (and flattened my poor dear wife against the passenger door temporarily), as I then rolled down the drivers side window and lined up the scene hand-held through the open window. The rain mostly stayed outside of the vehicle as I was doing this, although large puddles started to form on the top of the inside of the door and in the foot well and my legs started to get wet, but hey ho, you have to do what you have to do. I then held my breath (and so did my long suffering wife), as we kept as still as we could and waited for a lull in the buffeting motion of the wind on the car, as I then fired off a buffer full of shots just as the light seemed to be at its most interesting across the rocky outcrops to the left. I then waited for the image buffer to clear and did the same again, even though the light had now changed and the whole scene was going into darkness under the next wave of clouds, but by then reasonably happy in knowing, that I only wanted the one shot out of the bunch and that I was pretty sure I had got that already.
I then wound up the window, mopped up the water as much as I could (it was only a rental after all) and then drove on to the next location, to spend a little while trying to dry my jeans out as much as I could under the heater.
Hope this helps
Dave
