Boat Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

If I casually looked at this image without knowing any better, I’d assume it was a scan of a hand-painted print, or had been substantially worked in Photoshop. While I have absolutely no shame about creative post-processing or hand painting, this in fact is pretty much an in-camera creation.

During my recent night photography workshop, I was looking down from the second story of the historic Coastguard Boathouse straight out to sea at the tracks used to launch rescue boats. The window pane was covered with rain and salt spray. I put the focus to manual and set the camera to infinity. Placing the camera lens close to the dirty window, and exposing handheld with a wide open aperture, I came up with the serendipitous results you see.