Pixiq

For years, when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, like it or not, I had to shoot in the rain and wet. After a while, I got used to it, even adopted the whole "film noire" Rain City thing. I'd wander the glistening streets of Seattle, in the relentless drizzle, under an infinite, featureless grey sky. I shot black and white back then which perfectly captured the mood of isolation and loneliness that I felt, reflecting in my eyes the darkness of the urban soul.. I learned to keep my shoulder into the wind, my collar turned up, and my Leica nestled under my coat, safe and dry against my body. 

It’s different for me now. I live in the South of France where they say we 300 days of sun a year: and I’m okay with that. But I did get a heavy dose of the old rainy day shooting on a recent trip to the United Kingdom. We went to Derby, the old mining and mill region in the Midlands of England, a region of green pastures and brown-grey row houses. "Derbyshire mist", as they call rain there, hung over the Midlands for the entire week, pervasive and persistent. It made the endless, rough stone fences and sheep pastures look like impressionist paintings. Distant sheep and cattle became fuzzy white paint daubs, unmoving against a hazy green landscape.  If you have never photographed on a grey day, in lousy weather, you are missing a chance to experience some great light and color. 

Yeah, great light and color. On overcast days, light bounces around in the clouds and gets really diffused. It becomes terribly soft and wraps itself around things, the way you wrap your arms around a lover. It's a dim light too, that with its lower contrast and lack of brightness, seems to reach in and deepen the very heart of the colors. 

Back in the Northwest, film limited my ability to shoot in the rain as light levels tend to be are pretty damn low. Even with a great film like Tri-X, exposures were at wide open aperture settings like f/2, and were breathe holding slow, with shutter speeds longer than 1/30^th second common. Color film was out of the question since decent color films had ISO speeds of only 64 or 100. Additionally, the coolness of the stromy sky made images too blue and too cold. Adding pale "warming" filters to reduce this colorcast ate into exposure times, lengthening them even more. 

Digital photography is a godsend for the rainy day photographer. Most cameras produce good quality images at ISO speeds as high as 800 and image stabilizers allow for handheld longish exposures of a 1/15^th second or more. Sometimes too, I like to crank up the ISO until the image begins to fall apart a little as "noise" in the image reminds me of push-processed Tri-X, where the graininess of the film gave rainy day images a look not unlike chiaroscuro drawings. 

Shooting in the rain, or on overcast days, I tend to mess around with the White Balance, changing the settings and trying Auto, Daylight, Clouds, and Shadow, to see how each affects the colors. I do not want to simply record the colors of a scene, but rather I want to select a white balance to fit the mood I’m in at the moment. For instance, I’ll choose a cooler rendition if I want somber images that express isolation or distance, and a warmer one to reflect the nurturing, revitalizing nature of water.   

What I do do though that makes a big difference, is to set the camera exposure compensation control to -2/3 stop. Digital cameras have no artistic sensibility whatsoever and their auto exposure systems stupidly overexpose every "dark" scene as though they obsessively needing to brighten up the world. Excuse me, but that just defeats the whole point of shooting in bad weather. Forcing the camera to underexpose -2/3 of a stop, means that the image will be properly dark and moody, the colors won’t be washed out and the feeling of the weather retained. If the image is actually too dark it is easily lightened a touch with editing software.   

Now, I realize that it’s one thing not to want to go out in the rain with an expensive electronic camera but I am not talking about photographing in a storm or even photographing the rain itself. What I am saying is that bad weather can be a surprisingly good time to take photographs and the good news is that I think it’s going rain today.

---I’ve loaded a bunch of the photos from Derbyshire into the Gallery. I tried to turn the never-ending drizzle into visually interesting images--- 

You can also learn a lot about taking photographs under all sorts of conditions in my book "Capture The Light" (PIXIQ 2008) Click on my profile and you'll find the link to it.