It had taken a while to scramble down the extremely steep and slippery bank here, but amazingly I managed that without incident. Anyone who knows me knows that things like that don’t usually go to plan… I’d taken a while looking around and then setting up until I was happy to start shooting.
All was going well until this point. The shots I was getting all had some sort of what looked like an overexposed area at the top of the frame. No matter what I did, it kept happening. It had to be condensation, I guessed. I’d taken the filters off I was using and cleaned those, cleaned the lens, put it all back together (really not easy while standing in the middle of a river) and went again… same again! Dismantle everything again, same again! And this went on for about an hour, in which time I’d dropped my polarizer into the river along with all my lens cloths. I’d even ended up sitting in the river while bending down to see through the camera.
I’ve never had this problem ever before, and the temperature difference wasn’t that great from my camera bag to the outside, so no idea what was causing it. Really, really frustrating. I swapped camera bodies as a last resort, thinking it may have been in the camera body itself, and that did improve it, but not totally. I swapped lenses and even filter systems to a smaller one. I just had to keep going and keep cleaning until I got what I wanted. I got 2 shots over what I reckon was around 2 hours here. This was the first I was happy with—bit of a nightmare, really, but if it had taken all day, then so be it, not being beaten by a bit of lens fogging (although I very nearly did give up). It was really nice walking away from the place wet, but knowing I’d got something after all the hassle.
