After a brief delay due to a missed flight and re-routing through Pennsylvania, I am home once more. Sorry for not posting from the road but internet access was not always available to me, nor was there much time to even offload cards. I arrived home with nearly all of my shots still in-camera rather than on my portable hard drives. But as they say in Jamaica, “no problem, mon”.

The shot from the river raft above was a fun one. At the beginning of the run, I was shooting “normally” — trying to keep everything crisp and sharp, raising the ISO along the way to compensate for the setting sun and diminishing light. It was somewhat overcast and nearly sunset by this time and I gave in to the inevitability that I was going to change my game.

Embrace the darkness. Embrace the blur.

Rather than increasing ISO further and dealing with noise in post-processing, I held steady at ISO 800 and began shooting intentionally for some motion blur. At first I panned with passing rafts to isolate their pilots (captains?) and get dreamily blurred foliage behind. After several passes with that technique, I turned my attention to the pilot of my own raft. I steadied the camera on a bamboo cross-support of the raft and fired away. This particular shot is at f/5.6 — to give myself a wee bit of depth-of-field in case the focus was off — and half a second. By using the raft itself as a kind of tripod, I could maintain sharpness on it while the world swam past. I was amazed at the amount of detail and color that the sensor could capture in those dark conditions. More than you could see with the naked eye.

I nearly filled a card shooting in this way because I knew the ratio of keepers would be extremely low. But, what the heck, if I got one good one, I’d be happy. As it turns out, I have several. Had I been shooting film, I would certainly have been more conservative and I probably would have missed some real keepers.