Hilo Daily Image

 

 

 

 

Rain. This morning I embraced the rain by thinking of it as a photographic task. How to get a "rainscape?" I thought that only a telephoto would do. I realized that by shooting out into the rain, raindrops would always be in focus somewhere. So the trick was to use a wide aperture (so not too much would be in focus) and then use the focus point to throw the background more or less out of focus. As I said, the raindrops are always going to be in focus somewhere, so the only thing I needed to decide was how long I wanted the rain streaks to be. That was a matter of shutter speed -- slower speed, longer streaks; higher speed, shorter ones. At some point the longer ones become indistinct and the same is true for the shorter ones.

 

Back in Lightroom I discovered that I needed to push Contrast and Clarity up far, far beyond what I generally use. If this were a normal sort of image, what I did with Contrast and Clarity would have made it very gritty and ugly. I'm pretty sure I've never had reason to push both those two up as high as I did. But for this shot, it worked.