Exercise 31: Cloudy Weather and Rain

I thought it might be a while before I was able to shoot photos for this exercise.  If ever.  Dubai experiences only 25 days of precipitation per year, which on average - 2 days a month - doesn't seem so infrequent.   But look again at the amount of annual rainfall - 94mm - and you see how paltry rain actually is.  If you divide that annual average by the number of days, you get a daily average of less than 4mm. That's about the width of a wedding band.

In reality we seem to have a few days each year when we get a substantial downpour. For the others we have some clouds and a bit of drizzle.  You might not even know it rained until you saw a car, which is a great surface for showing the mess that results from water being splattered on a surface lightly coated with fine sand.  Like this:

It was my great fortune, then, to be on spring vacation this week when a massive storm blew in from Iraq.  Friday and Saturday were windy and dusty and then on Sunday the rain arrived, just before midday.  I ran up to the roof to get some comparison shots from my Light Through the Day project.  While I could get the canyon, getting the seaside shot was difficult.  I tried going up onto the helipad, but the wind was too strong and blowing from the sea, which would have made capturing an image impossible (without lots of water on the lens and perhaps me being blown off the helipad).

While the photo taken in midday sun is perhaps the most dramatic, the rainy-day image contains more detail of the objects in the image.  Where the midday sun creates deep shadows, the clouds diffuse and even-out the light.  The dust does the same, but because of the volume of dust detail is lost in background objects.  The dust also provides something of an orange cast, whereas the rain is slightly more blue.  

The rain didn't last long.  Perhaps half an hour.  I got a few rather average images like these of people dealing with the inconvenience.

I live next to a major highway and so took quite a few photos of cars.  I don't know why.  They were all very pedestrian and not at all worth sharing.  But as I began to look closer, I found something unexpected.

As you may have guessed, these images are reflections in the road.  Funny I didn't notice them then, because later I started noticing reflections in puddles.  And after playing around a bit in Lightroom, I came up with this collection.

This series is a good example of how ideas develop as a result of working with images.  I had not planned to do what you see here when I noticed the rain and went out to take photos.  It was only after walking around a bit that I started noticing reflections.  And then I started walking around puddles looking for interesting reflections and angles.  After that I started waiting for people to walk by to capture them in reflections, to give the image a bit more movement and life.  

After I got back to the computer I started trying to bring out depth in the reflections.  The best way I found of doing that was increasing contrast, but that made the colors far too saturated.  I had just watched a documentary about Andreas Feininger, who said he worked almost exclusively in B&W because color was too much like the world we see everyday and he was striving to produce images of uniqueness.  So the idea of using B&W was there at the front of my mind.  B&W helped with the color problem, but the images still appeared confusing because they required the viewer to do a mental flip, to turn the images over in the mind.  Why not do that for the viewer?  And once I did, I saw where I could use a bit of color to make these a bit more interesting.  The effect was achieved with a graduated filter. 

A few more images from this series can be found here.  

Over all, it turned out to be a pretty good day.  The only disappointment was at the mall, which I visited in the afternoon with the intention of purchasing a Sony RX100.  The only dealer in the country is now sold out and waiting for restock.  

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