Rain Feature

A rain feature from earlier in the week of the post below. The rain was coming, so the paper wanted something rainy.

I feel like I'm abysmal at finding features. I'm not good at finding those cool graphic images, so I went cruising, trying to beat the setting sun, looking for some life in the rain that wasn't an umbrella walking by a wall (I'm not knocking those type of rain-features, just saying that I'm not talented enough to pull them off).

When I saw these kids who'd just gotten off of the bus, I almost forgot to turn my car off, I jumped out of it so quick. They were standing in some puddles, just kicking water in each others faces. I took a couple frames with a long lens, but they stopped pretty soon and we got to talking. That's when I made this frame of their dirty, wet faces. I just thought they were funny.

When this ran, one of the writers at the paper described these kids as "chuckleheads." The picture seemed to resonate with people and actually work, people related to it, saw themselves or their own kids. I know I saw a bit of myself.

It's funny that photos like that, which I don't really like that much at all, in fact, I almost didn't even turn it in, end up being the photos like most of all. When I look at it, I wish I'd had a 35f1.4 so it was super clean in the background, super sharp on their faces, but yeah, I don't have that, and it turns out it doesn't matter so much.

Ramble, ramble, ramble. Anyway, here's one more that didn't even get turned in. These young, middle school couple was waiting at the bus stop for the boy's little brother, doing a little smooching. There the little boy is, well, being a little boy, tapping them on the shoulder and running away.


ps Wow, when I upload to blogger, color and saturation just go all over the place! I don't know why I can't get consistent results. Why can't it all look like it does in photo mechanic?!