STEADY HAND

ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/30 Second, 300mm

  I surprised myself tremendously yesterday.
  My buddy Tim Owens and I were out taking photographs by the Chilhowee Dam along the Little Tennessee River. It was raining so we had put our clear plastic camera covers on our cameras to keep them from getting water damage.
  The fog that was crawling along the river was incredible. Unfortunately, we were running short of good compositions. The entire time we were shooting, there was a lone fisherman kayaking on the other side of the river from us right through the fog. I took the opportunity to put my new 70-300mm IS USM Canon telephoto lens on the camera and try to catch some shots of this fisherman.
  My good friend, Ron Williams, surprisingly gave me this sweet Canon lens after his wife bought him an L Series 100-400mm IS lens. It was way too kind of him. This was the first time I have actually put it to good use.
  With the plastic rain cover on, it was terribly hard to see through the view finder. I was hand-holding the camera with it raining. I had to bump the ISO up to 1600 with the dim light and the long lens. I fired off several shots and even though I mustered only a 1/30 second shutter speed, the shots were halfway decent.
  I processed this shot in Adobe Lightroom and was really happy at the noise reduction I was able to do to reduce the high ISO noise. I did some creative cropping to remove unwanted items and then exported to Photoshop Elements where I did some adjustment layers and then applied the Dreamland Effect from OnOne's Perfect Effects 3 Free to darken the background and the foreground.