Weatherproof cameras

The mentality of people on photography (or should that be camera?) forums baffles me.I guess it shouldn't. Hobbyists of all sorts spend a disproportionate amount of time fretting over gear instead of using it. Mostly they don't use it for the simple reason of lack of time due to family/work commitments. A decent camera is also a fair financial investment for people too. So it's a little unfair to knock them when they worry about getting their gear wet.

If you are taking photos as a hobby then there's really no need to stay out in the rain all day getting wet. Never mind getting your camera wet. The fact of the matter, from my experience, is that you can get cameras wet in the rain. If you take sufficient precautions to keep water off the lens (which will bugger up your photos and is to be avoided) then you'll be doing enough to keep the camera's innards dry in light to middling rainfall in the UK. If you're in a real life monsoon, that might not be the case!

Tuck the camera under your waterproofs when not in use, wipe it down if the water looks like it's getting near anywhere it could get into the electrics. Stand under cover. Use some common sense. 

The fact is that rain makes for great street photography opportunities. Especially so if the light is either changeable or failing and artificial light beginning to take over. The problem I had yesterday was that the rain was just too heavy for me as I'd left my waterproof jacket behind. Otherwise I'd have stuck at it for longer. The colours were nice even if the pictures were run of the mill. The rain forced most of the people off the street anyway!

For a change, and to see if it still works, I dug out my currently underused 50mm lens. For taking photos from under cover it proved more useful than a wider lens as it now feels like using a moderate telephoto to me. I keep coming back to the notion that it doesn't worry me much what lens I have on my camera. I'll find some photos to fit it one way or another.

What using single focal length lenses most of the time lately has made me think about is how zooms tend to make you do just that. Zoom in to make a tighter framing. This might make for photographs with immediate impact through isolation, but it can lead to picture which lack context, fail to tell a story. Using a wider frame means you have to get in close to make a subject as large as you would with a longer lens from further away, but that width can include background which helps inform and explain the picture.

There are no set rules, of course. I find it interesting how my ways of thinking about making photographs is changing all the time. And how it makes me re-evaluate pictures by photographers whose work I haven't fully understood in the past.

Sometimes you see something which you have to take a photograph off simply to remember it. The skip on next door's drive will be gone soon and the Easter Island head I saw in it will be gone too. us humans are born to react to the features which we understand as faces even when they are made from bright red plastic.

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