I love cloudy days where I can make gloomy pictures with a threatening sky. That day in May, the weather was almost rainy and the wind was strong. Driving on the Ste-Marie road in St-Sébastien, I saw this abandoned house on top of a small hill. The trees were dancing in the wind gusts. Fortunately, it had not rained and in order to include the trees in the picture I had to stand in the dirt field as for the best view was in front of the house!
I wanted to show the wind raging and despite the cloud cover, the brightness was quite important. So I combined a neutral density filter and a polarizer to darken the image and give me an exposure time as long as possible: 1,3 seconds. Also, I used an aperture closed at its maximum, or f/22. The combination of filters and small aperture created a major drawback: the lack of sharpness. The light has to pass through two windows and suffer the diffraction of a small hole! Nevertheless, I “brought” the image back working on the sharpness during post processing.
Luckily I had my tripod anchored with my camera bag and 10 lbs weights…
