Having lived most of my life in New England, I can tell you that the old weather cliché “if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, it’s bound to change” is a lot more true than most photographers would like. It often seems that no sooner have I hopped out of the car to set up the tripod and photograph a pretty sunny scene than I start feel raindrops on my back. The funny thing is that I also spend a lot of time in the southwest deserts and in Florida, and after I’ve been shooting in beautiful sunshine for a week or two, I start to miss those unexpected changes in weather—including the raindrops.
Changes in weather not only provide variety to the look of landscapes and outdoor scenes, but they instigate shifts in the emotional climate as well and that is a wonderful thing. While it’s certainly simpler to take good pictures in nice weather, I find that a sudden bank of fog or a passing rainsquall can instantly transform an ordinary scene into a unexpectedly dramatic one. Sometimes the changes are gradual and you can see them coming—fog creeping into an early morning harbor scene, for example. Other times the changes are so sudden that there’s simply no way you could have prepared mentally for the transformation and that’s when having a mental plan for handling those situations is invaluable.
And while I refer to this in the title as "bad" weather, in reality, I love unusual weather--and it's actually a very good creative stimulus for taking better photos, especially landscape and travel pictures.
Storm clouds breaking up. Photographed over Long Island Sound from the Stratford, Connecticut shoreline.
Fog & Mist
It was Carl Sandburg that wrote:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
And Sandburg (who incidentally was married to famed photographer Edward
Steichen’s sister Lilian), was right, fog does just creep in silently
and it usually fades away just as quickly and mysteriously. While it’s
there, however, fog has a wonderful ability to transform common
landscapes and scenes into very romantic and evocative photos. It was
the soft morning mist that attracted me to the shot of the swan, for instance, and with hundreds of swan photos in my files
already, I probably would have passed the swan by otherwise.
If you’re lucky enough to live near a river or lake or in a hilly area,
fog and mist are a fairly common occurrences and they occur most
frequently when the humidity is very high and there is a drop in air
temperature. Both fog and mist (mist is really just a less intense form
of fog) tend to be quite intense after a cool night before the sun has
risen too high causing the air to warm. As the sun rises higher in the
sky the moisture evaporates and the fog and mist begin to thin rapidly,
so it’s important to shoot as quickly as possible or the atmosphere
will literally burn off. On a number of occasions I’ve watched the fog
disappear as I try to decide on a composition.
Fog is particularly appealing when it’s used with a thematically linked
subject, as in the harbor shot shown here. Because we associate harbors
and fishing boats with fog and mist, they seem to go naturally together
and, in fact, we almost expect to see fog in photos of harbors and
fishing boats. Long lenses intensify the look of fog because
they compress the fog and the subject causing detail and colors to
soften and melt away in the fog.
Exposing for fog is tricky because the moisture reflects a lot of light
fooling the camera into thinking there is more light than is really
there. If you photograph a foggy or misty scene using a matrix meter
reading, for example, the scene will undoubtedly be underexposed and
the fog will appear as a dark gray, rather than the lilting gentle blue
color that you want. To bring the tones back to a softer color, use
exposure compensation (or bracketing) to add between a stop and
one-and-a-half stops of additional light. Because thick fog can
sometimes be too blue looking, I usually set the white balance to
“cloudy” in order to warm it up just a touch.
Longer telephoto lenses will magnify the effects of fog so if you want
thicker looking fog choose a longer lens. But remember that the more
you magnify the lens the more the reflected light will fool your meter
so you may have to add additional compensation as the focal length
increases. Also, don’t depend on your LCD screen with fog because
images tend to look somewhat brighter on the LCD.
If you want to take fog photos but just can’t seem to catch a foggy
day, consider buying an inexpensive “fog” filter for your lens. Fog
filters mimic the look of fog and mist by diffusing the entire image
and you can buy them in varying degrees of intensity. You probably
won’t fool anyone into thinking it was real fog, but the effect can be
attractive nonetheless.
Oyster boat shot in fog on the Housatonic River in Stratford, Connecticut. The shot was made with a wide-angle lens.
You can exaggerate the effects of fog by using a long telephoto lens to compress the effects of the airborne moisture. Here I used a 300mm lens on a Nikon D70s (equivalent in 35mm lenses to a 450 lens).
Believe it or not these people are waiting in the pouring rain for a fountain show to start at Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia. I ducked into a doorway to get this shot of colorful umbrellas from a nice dry location.
Rainy Days
It’s tempting to stash the camera and head for the nearest café (or stay home and guard the TV) when the rain starts to fall, but like fog and mist, rain also has its pretty side. Rain also has some unique photographic advantages: it saturates colors, puts a glossy surface on subjects like leaves and grass and, at night, drips colorful reflections across rain-soaked streets. Also, like fog and mist, rain adds atmosphere to landscape and travel shots.
You don’t necessarily have to get soaked to get good photos of rain, either. It’s easy to hide out under awning or in a doorway, which is exactly what I did to get the shot of the umbrella-hidden people in 10-5 watching (of all things) a fountain show at Longwood Gardens during a downpour. Your car also makes a nice dry vantage point from which to shoot (and has the added advantage of letting you listen to music while you work). I took the wet and somewhat abstract view of Monument Valley shown here through the windshield of our car as the headlights of another car approached during in an intense thunderstorm. (A few minutes later we got caught in a flash flood in the valley--so be sure that you're in a safe place when you're taking pictures in the rain--especially in the desert where flash floods are a constant and real threat.)
Rain really doesn’t create any exposure problems other than the fact that overcast skies will force you to show at slower shutter speeds or open up the lens (or raise the ISO). Rainy days, like mist and fog, also steal a lot of warmth from scenes so it’s best to add some back using the cloudy day or open shade white balance. If the rain is falling hard enough, you can also intentionally slow down the shutter speed to turn the rain into long streaks, or you can try and use a faster shutter speed to freeze the raindrops.
Protecting your camera: The one thing you don't want to happen on a rainy day is to get your nice digital camera wet. You can protect it completely by carrying it in a zipper bag when you're not shooting and then just pulling it out long enough to take the shot. Or you can poke a hole for the lens to stick through and just leave the bag on while you're shooting. You can also buy a relatively inexpensive bag-type underwater housing (they're even available for point-and-shoot cameras) to protect your camera completely (and give you better access to camer controls). An umbrella, obviously, is a good thing to have as well--especically if you can get someone to hold it for you.
Your car makes a great place to shoot from in the rain. I took thish photo of an approaching car in Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona border. I focused on the rain on the windshield to throw the huge rock formations and oncoming headlights out of focus.
Stormy Skies
Stormy skies are a great by-product of rainy days and you usually get two opportunities to shoot them—before and after the storm itself. Cloud formations, especially when combined with colorful sunset lighting, often put on transient sky shows that are hard to fathom even when you’re standing there watching them. In fact, I often venture out into storms at sunset time hoping that it will break up and that the sky will get intense with color and passion, as it did in the beach scene at right. I’ve shot as many as 100 pictures in a 15-minute period immediately after a storm because the cloud formations morph and re-invent themselves so quickly that no two shots are alike. Exposing for clouds is pretty straightforward: I usually take a matrix meter reading directly from the clouds and then use about one stop of minus exposure compensation to darken the clouds even further.
A warming filter used over the lens (or added later in Photoshop) will really enhance the "hot" emotional feeling of scenes like this while a blue filter (or even just setting the white balance for tungsten light--which adds blue) will give the shot a distant, cool feeling.
Gathering or departing storms, especially at sunrise or sunset, can produce very dramatic images. What looks like a brooding stormy sky can suddenly burst to life when the sun slips between a few cloud banks and shoots "God rays" down to earth.
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