It was a cold, dull, wet and windy afternoon in London, but that didn’t stop everyone at the ‘Reclaim Love‘ Valentine party at Piccadilly Circus having fun, though it did make photography rather tricky at times. As usual in wet weather I was working holding a lens cloth in my hand and wiping the filter on the front of the 16-35mm before every image, but even so on the picture above you can see several areas of unsharpness caused by raindrops on the front of the lens.
It didn’t worry me when looking at pictures such as these, where what I thought were the key elements of the images were sharp, though I don’t particularly like the water-induced flare visible around the head and arms of the dancer above, it doesn’t spoil the image for me. But there were plenty of images that I had to edit out because of water in the wrong places.
The Nikon 16-35mm is a good lens to use in the rain, for several reasons. Being a professional lens it has better water-sealing than most, and this is greatly helped by internal zooming and focussing – there is no change at all on the outside of the lens other than the rotation of the two rings for zoom and focus. The front of the lens doesn’t move at all, and there is none of the extension of the lens that you get with most zooms. The 18-105DX lens is a typical example, and the zoom action works to pump water and damp air into the lens, where it condenses on the large cold glass elements and pictures soon become completely impossible.
I took very few pictures with the 18-105mm mainly for this reason, but also because much of the time I was working in very crowded situations where the 10.5mm DX semi-fisheye was more useful. Being a single focal length with virtually no need to focus avoids much of the problems of water ingress, but it has a bulbous front element unprotected from the weather – you can’t really have a lens hood on a lens with a 180 degree diagonal field of view. So it suffers even more from raindrops than does the 16-35, although the lens hood on that is pretty vestigial.
Although some of those taking part had umbrellas, it’s not really an option if you want to move around and take pictures, and of course the drips from these umbrellas are an extra hazard for the photographer.
Using flash in the rain also has its odd problems or opportunities, as you can just see from the red umbrella, where the white streak at its left is a rain drop, illuminated by the flash – and some more can be seen less obviously in front of the dark fountain supporting Eros (though it’s actually his brother.) But I needed flash, because without it the pictures were too dull and failed to bring out the party atmosphere.
The Nikon SB800 flash is perhaps the least waterproof of all my equipment and most difficult to protect from the rain. As you can see from Reclaim Love – Occupy Your Heart! I took (and put on My London Diary) too many pictures, and by the time I gave up I was rather damp and the flash was soaked and had stopped working. It did recover after drying out, but has since failed more or less completely. Hopefully a trip to the repairers will get it working again.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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