Shooting in the Rain
I went out shooting some pictures during the recent storm that hit Britain [Clarissa I think they called it] and had the indecency to splash us and soak us with wind and rain recently.
It’s funny how the sky can look pretty mad when a storm is nearby. I remember a hurricane hit Ireland a few years back. I was living in England at the time, and the sky went an insane orange colour. It looked so ominous, the colour of the sky, and you would understand why people back in the Middle Ages would be bricking it. But for us moderns, we understand that the sky goes this colour, not because some evil is being foretold, but because a storm is close enough to us to impact us, but not close enough to really mess us over.
I say all of this as a preface, because the day I went out shooting was a few days before the storm hit Britain, and the sky went a mad colour which I managed to catch with the photos.
One of the things I tried that day was shooting through a plastic bag. In part because at one point the rain shower was very heavy and I didn’t want my camera getting soaked, but also because I wanted to see what kind of effects I would get if I shot through the plastic bag. I think I need a little more experimentation with it. But I will see.
Shooting in this kind of light presents a number of challenges that make the whole process a pain. First, the light is dim, which means you either have to amp up the ISO levels, or go with a wide aperture, or shoot with a slower shutter speed. For these shots, I knocked the ISO to 1000, set the aperture to f/8 and shot at a speed of 1/20th to 1/13th.
What I did enjoy about shooting street in the wet conditions of a blustery November day, was the frantic energy of the photos as both the subjects and I raced around trying to get from dry haven to the next.
The first image shows one of the better of my plastic bag shots. It has a dreaminess to it that was not present in the other ones, but then again, the others were shot in a duller part of the town that did not have the lights that the main street has.
Once I got to the main street the rain lessoned and all the other shots followed it. I like the energy of them, and the sense of getting where you need to go come across in them.
Want to know why I use such strong colours in my photography? Check out the next post which explains what influenced that decision.
© Vincent S. Coster 2025
