September 24, 2009 - Cleaning up from the flood

1/50

f4

ISO 400

27mm

RAW

I went to watch Emma at tennis practice today and heard some commotion in the woods behind the tennis courts. I found a county crew trying to clean out this massive drainage pipe, which had become clogged sometime during (or maybe even before) the flooding we had.

The pipe is what a small creek flows through as it goes under one of the roads in our neighborhood. Normally, the creek doesn't have much more than a trickle flowing through it, but was fairly raging during the flood because at least 20 yards empty into it just from our neighborhood alone.

Because of the clog, the creek backed up until it flowed over through one of the houses and over the street. Then it joined up with a larger creek and flooded out the tennis court and swimming pool area. The county crew was trying to clear out the clog so they could send an engineer into the pipe to inspect it for washout damage under the roadway.

This photo was kind of challenging because of the lighting. We were in the thick trees, but there were several open spots that was letting in quite a bit of light. This light was confusing the camera and making it underexpose the majority of the photo. I put the camera into 'P' mode (which on my Canon is one spot away from the fully automatic green mode). This allowed the camera to make all of the adjustments it thought it needed but also gave me the chance to override it.

Since the camera was underexposing the photo pretty severely, I used the exposure compensation setting to overexpose the shot by nearly one full stop. This canceled out the camera's confusion and gave me the exposure I wanted.

I wish I could have used the camera's flash, but that would have drawn a lot of attention to me and I wasn't sure I wanted it. I was worried a little that they might complain if it became obvious I was photographing their work. But if I could have used a flash it would have helped light up the shadows of the photo, especially in the pipe.