“I’ll keep my fingers crossed it doesn’t rain,” was a common refrain I heard from the people posing for me.  I’d always laugh and say the same thing, “I don’t care about the rain, I care about wind.”

With rain, just put an umbrella over the camera and you’re good.  However, shooting in low light with long exposures, wind is a nightmare because if anything in the image is moving, it will be blurry.  This was the shoot where I realized that.  More specifically, if you’re doing a long exposure photograph, you do not want a flag in the image.  That was a problem here because the whole point of the photo was that Charley Grant was going to be removing his American flag for the evening while his wife, Mollie, was upstairs in the house.

There were two distinct and nightmare issues with the creation of this photo.  The aforementioned wind issue with the flag and the fact that, because of the colors in the flag, the plants and porch, there was literally no color of clothing that Charley could wear and stand out from the background.

*** SPOILER ALERT – PHOTOSHOP INFORMATION FORTHCOMING ***

After changing the color of his shirt in Photoshop to green, black, grey, blue and purple (red wouldn’t have worked because of the flag), I finally realized that the only way around the issue was to change the background.  Once I darkened the area behind Charley, the photo got a lot better… but it also created another problem.  There was supposed to be a part of the house behind him.  A little more Photoshop later, the missing first floor of the house returned and the image finally worked.

*** END SPOILER ALERT ***

Just don’t tell me that Mollie looks like Norman Bates’ mother in the upstairs window…