Cloudy weather and rain - part 3

Part 3 of this exercise is to take photographs in rainy conditions. I have included two photographs from our visit to Scotland and northern England in August and a third photograph from a visit to France last year.

Queue at Edinburgh Fringe

Nikon 18-70mm at 18mm: Iso 640 f6.3 for 1/160th second

The weather was surprisingly dry during our visit to Edingburgh so I was relatively lucky that it started to drizzle whilst we were waiting to go in to one of the performances of the Fringe Festival. For this photo, I stood on a step to get a high viewpoint over the line of umbrellas.

The light level was so low that I needed to use Iso 640 to obtain a shutter speed quick enough for a hand-held photograph. This photo stood out from the other views that I took because of the blue umbrella and the two women chatting together underneath it. The depth of field with f6.3 aperture was surprisingly good.

I was prompted to take this by a previous photo that I liked of a line of people queuing in the rain in Barcelona:-

In between showers

Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 200 f8 for 1/350th second

This was one of those moments of sunshine in between heavy showers. This is the High Street of Brampton, the final stop on a walking holiday on Hadrians Wall. I saw the sunlight highlighting the roof tops and whisked my camera out of the bag to take a quick photo before the local bus stopped to drop off passengers obscuring the view. There was fortunately plenty of light so that the Iso 200 setting and f8 produced a reasonably good exposure of this high contrast scene.

Then the rain eased off

Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 500 f4.5 for 1/750th second

We had sheltered from a sudden downpour in a small town in northern France. When the heaviest rain eased slightly, my wife and a friend started to walk up this hill on the way back to the car. Seeing the light reflection in the surface of the road, I stopped to take this picture before they disappeared too far ahead. Unfortunately, the photograph lacks quality as the dark areas are very noisy and the figures are soft edged due to the wide aperture. I am hoping to have an opportunity to take a similar picture in future, but this has not so far happened.

Conclusions

Whilst I would not normally deliberately go out in wet weather to take photographs, I do look out for interesting light when the weather turns stormy out of doors. I am developing a small repertoire of rainy day photographs.