Taking photos in the rain

Contributing editor Jim Richardson is a photojournalist recognized for his explorations of small-town life. His photos appear frequently in National Geographic magazine.
A wonderful thing happened during our National Geographic Expeditions workshop in Venice a couple of years ago: It rained all week.
Well, not quite all week, but enough that it got to be a running joke. We thought we might just get to see one of the legendary Venetian floods washing through the Piazza San Marco. We weren’t quite that lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view), but it rained when we toured Murano and it rained as we traversed the Rialto Bridge en route to dinner and it rained on us in the gondolas and sandolos without pity. “Now, this is actually an opportunity,” I kept repeating as we huddled under our umbrellas. Nobody believed me. I sounded (and looked) like a drowned rat putting a good face on impending doom.
Then something wonderful happened: The sun came out. Student photographers rushed out to capture the glories of Venice. And, lo and behold, they came back disappointed! “It looked better in the rain,” was the near-universal sentiment.
In fact, Venice had looked magical in the rain. In case you hadn’t noticed, Venice gets its share of photographers, and the rains had transformed numbingly familiar scenes into something fresh and ripe for discovery. It may be a truism but it’s still worth trumpeting—when it starts to rain, good photographers head out to make pictures.
There are, of course, problems involved, and these break down into two categories. One, how to keep your camera dry (nobody cares whether the photographer gets wet), and two, how to show rain in the pictures. This second item seems paradoxical. How can you not show rain in the pictures? Amazingly, the rain often look dull, gray, and on the edge of being invisible.
So, here are a few tips:

• Carry a raincoat for your camera. There are about a million rain covers for camera gear on the market. The real problem is having it with you when it starts to rain. Anything that will protect your camera completely against every storm, up to and including a hurricane, may well be too bulky to carry every day. My advice: Carry camera rain gear in your bag that won’t take up too much space and will get you by in a pinch. My current favorite is the Storm Jacket from Vortex Media (www.warmcards.com/SJ1.html). It has an adjustable elastic band up front to cinch around the front of the lens and another at the back to give your hand room to reach inside to run the camera. Simple but effective in many wet situations.
• Carry a gallon-size plastic bag. In a pinch, it will do a passable job of keeping a camera dry. Punch a hole in one end to poke the lens through and stick your hand in the other end.
• Look for porches and awnings. Park under a dry spot and wait for the pictures to come to you. Have a glass of wine, read a book, discuss Proust ad infinitum. Just be patient.
• Shoot from inside a car. This is often the best course of action, and sometimes it's the only practical answer. You can often roll down the window and stay pretty dry, especially if the wind is at your back (coming from the other side of the car). This was the case when I photographed a freight train of a thunderstorm out in the Flint Hills of Kansas for National Geographic magazine. I outraced the storm to a great vantage point and turned the car sideways so I could look down a winding pasture road. The rain beat mercilessly behind me as the funnel clouds dipped and soared, but I kept dry and kept shooting. (Don’t try this at home.)
• Buy an umbrella. I always carry a small folding umbrella in my camera bag. It’s five inches long (13 centimeters) folded—just big enough to keep my camera out of the worst wetness. If you are in a city when it starts to rain, look around for an umbrella vendor. I found one in Venice and bought two, each a different color. (Why? There’s a tip about this coming up.) It would be nice if you had a trusty assistant (or patient spouse) to carry the umbrella, but I find I can do a lot of work just holding the shaft of the umbrella in my left hand, which also grips the camera. A little awkward, yes, but it has the advantage of keeping the umbrella right over the camera. (Do I need to add here that this advice does not apply in thunderstorms? Umbrellas are remarkably akin to lightning rods in physical construction and work pretty much the same. Remember: If you can hear thunder you are within striking distance of lightning.)
• Include the umbrella in your picture. Actually, your own umbrella can be a very nice compositional framing device. Bring it down into the top of the picture when you are shooting with a wide angle and it nicely fills the upper part of the frame, providing a nice visual cue that it is, in fact, raining. If the streets are full of people under umbrellas, yours fits in with the crowd. But it can do one more important thing. While we think of rain clouds being dark and foreboding, they are, in fact, often the light source for a rainy scene. Hence, the clouds are bright and the scene below is dark. Use the umbrella to cover up the too-bright clouds and your scene can suddenly look much better exposed. (Those two umbrellas I bought in Venice? It was because I wasn’t sure which color would look best in my pictures.)
• Watch for reflections. Unless you are in a downpour, it is difficult to actually see the rain itself. So you have to leave visual clues that it is raining. Look for ways that the rain transforms banal scenes into rich, reflected murals. This is what made the streets of Venice so glittering at night during our workshop. It also is the reason I chased that pigeon all over that piazza, silhouetting it against the reflected storefronts.
• Backlight the rain. Rain becomes more visible when it is backlit. The light coming through the raindrops is concentrated and slightly brighter than the rest of the scene. So find some light sources and shoot toward it. This could be a streetlight at night, or it could be the sun breaking though the clouds. Whatever the case, the rules are the same. One, the more directly you shoot into the light, the better you can see the raindrops. Two, shoot too directly and the light source will overpower your exposure. So always seek that magic angle in between. By the way, that umbrella you’ve been carrying can serve as a serviceable lens shade.
• Pop just a little flash. Huh? No, really, I mean it. Your flash will light up the raindrops, usually a bad thing because it will pump out way too much light as it tries to light up your subject. You don’t want that. But turn it way down (like -3.0 stops) and it will add just a little pop to the raindrops. This technique is tricky; you’ll have to experiment. Maybe it won’t work at all, but if it does, it can be quite magical. (Also works on snowflakes sometimes.)
• Be on the lookout for joy or misery. Rain transforms people. We react to rain with a gamut of emotions, from the sullen dread of rain-drenched commuters to the wondrous joy of children. Capture those emotions and you’ll have a great rain picture.

"If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of better stuff."

That's a simple mantra and I repeat it like some mystical incantation rooted in utter practicality. I share it with other photographers and I endeavor to follow my own advice. As a result, I spend a great deal of time doing photo research, looking for great locations to shoot. Put simply, I'm a better photographer when I'm standing in front of something wonderful like the Grand Canyon.

Getting to wonderful places is bread-and-butter photography. Getting there is only half of any great photograph's story. The other half is how the photographer prepared to envision the subject once in front of it.

Example: Today my mind is absorbed in the long climb up Skellig Michael, that remote crag isolated in the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland. There, Celtic monks found their solace in spiritual isolation 1,400 years ago. I have never been on Skellig Michael, though I have come close four times. Each time I was thwarted by high seas. Mentally I am preparing to be among the beehive huts in the monastery at the summit, in the mindset of ascetic hermits seeking their spiritual desert in the vast Atlantic.

In four days I'll board the National Geographic Explorer for a cruise of the British and Irish Isles, and I'll have a chance once again to ascend the slopes of Skellig Michael. I want to be ready to seize the day.

For me, this groundwork is part of photography, as essential as knowing exposure and lighting or recognizing the decisive moment. Research sounds like drudgery to many photographers, but for others digging into a subject in advance is part of the pleasure—its own reward. I'm one of those photographers.

Philosophically, photographers seem to divide along that fault line. On one side are those who desire only to be in the moment. For them, forethought only distorts perception. On the other side are the planners. These folks would never dream of going out the door without a full shoot list, or even a script. (Actually there is a third group nowadays. They just capture scenes wholesale and do all the creative work in Photoshop after the fact.)

Fortunately it doesn't have to be an either/or decision. Most National Geographic photographers I know do both: research extensively to prepare their schedule (and their minds) and then become existentially in-the-moment once on site.

Here are a few things I do to get ready for a photographic trip:

• Create a research file for each location. For my upcoming cruise I already know where we are going day by day. So I start a file for each location and start compiling information. At the least I'll get the Wikipedia entry for every site as background.
• Dig up photos. Just knowing what the place looks like is invaluable, so I'll hit several of the Internet photo sites like Flickr or the major stock photo sites like Corbis or Getty. Besides clueing me in to the photographic possibilities, this research can also show me what angles have already become clichés to be avoided. And I'll find angles I didn't expect from locations I hadn't imagined. Armed with these I'll be better prepared to push the expected.
• Ransack guidebooks and photo books. Guidebooks tend to show the standard scenes but they are comprehensive. Photo books show what a devoted photographer can make of a place. Both of these help me expand my expectations.
• Research your destination to death. Turn to online search engines to seek out-of-the-ordinary shots of your destinations. Once, when preparing for a trip to Ireland, I searched the term "Celtic priest" and the results turned up Dara Malloy on Inishmore. Dara performs Celtic weddings in a 900-year-old church. A quick phone call to Dara revealed he had a couple coming from Tokyo to be married, which resulted in a photo in National Geographic magazine.
• Look for places and events that are seasonal and timeless. Open your mind to what might be a picture subject. Most travelers tend to think only of places, without delving deeper into culture, history, and meaning. I try to get in time with the rhythm of the place and in tune with its melody.

from jim richardson's photo research