If I Were a Raindrop

Of all the images I have shot this is the one, "If I were a Raindrop" is the image that has been the most widely seen. Until the image "Eiffel Tower in Snow" Raindrop was my most iconic. I shot this image during the time I was shooting the San Francisco Presidio. It had rained for two week straight. It was April 8th, my birthday. Needless to say I had cabin fever. My friend Warren White, who was in charge of location scouting for the Presidio, came over when we had a brief pause in the rain.

I did not find this shot, this shot found me. I tripped over a tree root and as I was falling I saw this image and shot it. When we both looked at the image on the back of my camera I believe my exact words were " Sh*t, If I was a F**king raindrop I'd wanna be this f**king raindrop" (I am a photographer after all and we have been known to have colorful language in the field) So in my studio this image started being referred to as "raindrop" also "Sh*t, If I was a F**king raindrop I'd wanna be this f**king raindrop" is not a title that would help sell the image. When my first book "Welcome to Oz"  came out I received a critical review about "my sudo intellectual new age titles" of my images. There is nothing pseudo intellectual or new age about titles of the images that have titles.  In every instance they are the punchline to inside jokes to me. They are part of the actual story. Have I stopped naming my images because of one person finding them offensive? Nope. I make all of my images for me. Don't get me wrong I truly do appreciate that many people like my images, but the only person that matters when it comes to creating an expression of one's voice is the person who's voice is being expressed. It is also the only person who has to be pleased and the only person who's opinion matters.

I have also worked on this image for 13 years. I have sold it many times and licensed it for years many times as well but it is one of the images that as my technique improves through practice I come back to from time to time.  In the poet Rilke's book  Letters to a Young Poet" he said "Poems are never completed, they are abandoned and we just revisit them from time to time." To me a photograph is a visual poem. Frequently we are done with them but as frequently we find we have to abandon them only come back from time to time and revisit them to add clarity to what we are trying to say.

The big question is "when to you stop futzing with an image?" That answer is simple when what ever you just did makes the image worse than before you did it, take one step back and call it a day.

This image was captured with a Nikon D-1x camera with a 70-210mm D SERIES lens using the Nikon electronic file format (.Nef) Shot on Lexar Flash media. This file was originally post processed using NIKON capture Photoshop 5 and Nik Colorefex 2. I have since gone back and worked on this image all the way up to CS6 ond Color Efex Pro 4.


Final file is stored and scaled using Genuine Fractals.

© Vincent Versace 2012

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