I got my first camera for Christmas in 2004. Before that, I had only ever used other people’s devices, and later loaner equipment from school for photography classes.

About a week after Christmas, we got heavy rain and the bridge had to be shut down, so a friend and I decided to see what we could see hiking down by the bridge. You should never go hiking in the river basin during rainy weather, it is very dangerous (flash flood risk).

I think the last two photos were created by using a flash accidentally when I didn’t intend to; as a result the foreground falling rain and mist were illuminated and the exposure corrected for that, sending the background into a much deeper darkness than I’d actually intended. While accidental, I actually loved how the photos came out. They seemed creepy, dreamlike, ethereal, and sort of surreal. And moody.

I think these photos might technically be the first photos outside of a classroom setting where I began experimenting more with exposure times and lighting for “artistic outcomes” rather than accurately representing a subject, but since it was accidental and I was never really able to recreate it you might consider it an outlier. This first camera was some kind of Canon Powershot digital camera and I didn’t really start experimenting more seriously with shutter speeds until I got a DSLR where it was a little easier to control on the fly.

Oh, and to get a sense of how high the water had risen, this is from about a week or two later (the graffiti on the support column for the bridge in the background was totally covered by the water, estimated 6′):