52 Weeks - Week 1: "Rain"

Recently, I've been watching several people doing their 365's - this is where you take at least 1 picture every day, usually with a theme.  I really like the idea of doing something like that, but we're already a good 90 days into the year as I write this and I didn't really want to wait for next year.  Anyway, on thinking about it, I decided I'd rather take a bit of time thinking about a theme and see what I could do over a few days, so I've decided to do 52 themes - one a week, ending on a Sunday.  My wife is setting the themes, and this first week's topic is "rain".

Apparently, my wife's plan was that if I had a week to take photos of rain, then it would not rain at all.  While that wasn't quite true, it did conspire to do nothing more than drizzle at inappropriate times during the week, so it did make things somewhat difficult for me!

The first shot (above) was from inside the car of the stationary windscreen wiper.  It works better in B&W, but I'm not really sure it's a particularly great shot (7D, 24-70L at 70mm, 1/200s, f2.8, ISO400).

On one of the days, it started raining outside, so I grabbed the 7D and 24-70L and try to capture the Daffodils in the front garden in some rainy glory:

 (7D, 24-70L at 70mm,1/250s, f2.8, ISO400)

I left the 24-70L on the 7D as both of these are the best weather sealed body and lens that I own.  The 17-40 is weather sealed with a filter on the front, but the hood is so shallow (as it's a wide angle lens) that it would end up covered in rain drops in no time!  The 24-70L at 70mm has the front element quite deep inside the hood, so most of my shots in the rain were with this setup.

This shot was one of a few where I stuck the camera and flash out the back door on the one occasion when it was properly raining to try and catch the drops.  It took quite a few attempts to get something interesting, and here it is (I removed the colour then applied a duo-tone effect to brighten it up a little):

  (7D, 24-70L at 24mm, 1/100s, f2.8, ISO400)

 This is the lines of the wooden garden table in the rain.  I was hoping to capture some rain drops hitting it, but once again the rain was a pathetic drizzle, so I opted for the lines and texture of the wet wood:

  (7D, 24-70L at 70mm,1/250s at f5.6, ISO160)

I then took a few shots of rain drops on plastic - forming nice droplets and giving some texture to otherwise dull, flat material:

 (7D, 24-70L at 34mm, 1/1000s at f2.8, ISO160)

 (7D, 24-70L at 70mm, 1/500s at f2.8, ISO160)

On the Sunday that my theme finished, we went to a garden centre and bought an umbrella, so I got my daughter Sophie to muck around in the garden in the rain for a minute (literally - she's sick of the camera and I had to bribe her to get that minute!).  Here are a couple of results:

 (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, ISO100)

 (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/125s, ISO100)

In conclusion - I had some grand ideas for how I could capture shot of rain, and had some great pre-visualised shots in my head.  But both time and the weather conspired against me to produce the shots I really wanted (however, it did give me the inspiration to do the shots with the shower!).

What I will say is that it has been brilliant to have a focus, to think about what I want to get from shots, to plan in advance in my head what I want to capture, and to have a theme and date to work towards.  I'm enjoying this at the moment, and looking forward to next weeks...

Next weeks theme is "Rainbow".