Rain on the Roof

Below is a shot of raindrops on my sunroof.

(Click on the image to view it in full-screen mode)

It has been a particularly cold, wet, miserable, winter in Birmingham, AL. Cold and unpleasant enough, in fact, to make it untenable to get out and shoot nearly as much as I'd like. So to compensate, it's been necessary to find alternative outlets -- to shoot whatever I have a chance to work with. This sometimes means "inventing" subject matter. So I was driving back after lunch in yet another day's pelting rain. As I arrived back at work I reached back to the back seat floorboard to grab my umbrella, and I noticed the pattern the raindrops were making on my sunroof. It seemed interesting, so I got my D700, grabbed my venerable 70-180 Micro-Nikkor lens, laid across the console, and popped off a few shots. Invigorating!

Due to the cloud cover, the exposure required no compensation for backlighting. And in this rare instance, I didn't use a flash. The hard part was getting the camera still enough to ensure a sharp image, as there's little opportunity for a tripod when I'l laid out across the front seats of my BMW. So I gave up some ISO (800) in order to get a high shutter speed (1/125) and a shrp image without camera shake. Getting the camera parallel to the sunroof was equally important.

The 70-180 Micro-Nikkor is (was) a remarkable lens -- the only zoom macro lens ever built. The lens is relatively light and complact, and uses the common 62mm filters. It isespecially useful because the photographer can use the zoom to alter the composition without running the camera back and forth to anything like the degree required by fixed focal length macro (micro) lenses. The lens is very sharp at all focal lengths, and balances and handles well. In a pinch, the 70-180 mm focal length makes the lens a good all-around mid-range tele zoom. The drawbacks? The F/3.5-5.6 aperture renders the lens a bit slow to be a useful portrait or low-light lens. The AF is slow, particularly when compared to moden AF-S lenses, and the AF./MF slider is unforgiveably bad. That and the tripod mount is rather dinky. But apart from those complaints, this is a beast of a lens: great range of focal lengths, extraordinary sharpness, and relatively affordable. The pity is that Nikon only iported the lens for a very few years. It's been gone for a decade or so now, and the legend of the 70-180 continues to grow. I seem to recall having bought my lens new for $795 in the 90's. Used copies sell for almost twice that now.

As we thaw out and dry out from the winter I'll be posting more and more outdoor work in the weeks and months to come. I hope. Look for more examples of the 70-180 Micro-Nikkor as I use it for widflowers, butterflies, and the like.