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So, you've been planning a photo vacation for a year. Everything's set. Only problem? Now that the day has come and your plane's touched down, the weather's not cooperating: Rain, rain, rain. A disaster, right?
Not really. Step up and embrace the challenge. The photos you can capture in inclement conditions can be photos that are every bit as exciting as what you'd get from sunshine.
Ricocheting rain drops, roiling clouds, stabs of lightning, and billowing wisps of mist are the ingredients of highly evocative photography, and can give your images a "you-are-there" atmospheric punch. Gray, rainy day pictures often have their own sweet romance. And photos of neon-lit street scenes after dark are as boldly chromatic as any colors captured on a bright summer's day.
So don't mope -- change your game plan and shoot! Here are tips to help you pull photo victory from the jaws of what others might see as meteorological defeat.
WORK THE NIGHT SHIFT. Rainy conditions are the best for photographing neon-lit city scenes after dark. Check with your hotel concierge, or study city maps for commercial, entertainment, and industrial districts ablaze with artificial light after the sun goes down. Rain turns black asphalt streets into blazing mirrors of color.
BE READY FOR LOW LIGHT. Under raincloud-darkened skies, use all the usual low-light techniques: Dial in higher ISOs -- start with ISO 800, and go up if necessary. Use a tripod or monopod. Rain clouds also cool down daylight's color temperature, so compensate by spinning your digital camera off its auto white-balance setting, and dial in the Overcast or Cloudy preset. The results not to your liking? Set a custom white balance.
LET THE WEATHER BE YOUR SUBJECT. Go for the bigger picture, too: Shoot looming cloudscapes, shafts of lightning, and rolling banks of mist. (Tip: Don't expect much from rainbows. They rarely look as magical in photos as they do in real life.)
Speaking of lightning, try using it as your light source at night. In the midst of a lightning storm, set your (covered) camera on a tripod, and aim it at, say, a famous landmark. Set an appropriate aperture (wide for a dark subject, closed down for a brightly lit subject), and open the shutter in the camera's bulb mode. When lightning flashes, close the shutter. The photo may not always be successful, but it's guaranteed to be different from 99.9% of the photos made of that landmark!
EXAGGERATE THE WET.
Often photographers are in denial about nasty weather. They will overexpose to brighten outdoor scenes and tweak color saturation for sunnier color palettes. The results are rarely worth the effort, and no one is fooled.
Bad weather can be beautiful, so go for it. Capture dark, dismal rainy days by dialing down exposure compensation by a half or even a full stop. Make the most of the dark. Go in close. Capture raindrops in midair (lit by your on-camera flash), or bouncing off surfaces, or clustered on panes of glass. Look for the concentric circles raindrops create in puddles.
Try focusing on the human response to rain: umbrellas shot from above, pedestrians huddled in raincoats, dashing between raindrops, and leaping over puddles.
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