Weekly Shooting Excursion V: Rainy Chinatown Night

Another weekly shooting excursion, this time, more rainy night shooting.

I love shooting in the city on rainy nights, and it’s pretty easy to figure out why. It’s a great way to get gorgeous shots full of color and reflected lights. Of course, it’s also easy to get wet and cold, and to get blurry photos from raindrops on the camera lens and shooting with long shutter speeds, but it’s worth the inconvenience. I’ve been fortunate to shoot on rainy nights in a few places-Boston (that was a fun one, it was my first time in the city, and wandering alone on an overly chilly mid-summer night in the rain in an unfamiliar place with no rainwear was oddly enjoyable), Madison, WI on a stormy night last Thanksgiving weekend, dodging hailstones while shooting, twice in Blue Island, a Chicago suburb close to where I live. I don’t get to do it often-it’s not always raining at night, of course, and when it does, I don’t have my camera with me, or am ready for bed, or just don’t feel like doing it. 

I was happy, then, to check the weather report and find that storms were forecast to move into the Chicago area right as night was falling. I chose Chinatown to shoot. I’ve shot so many times in that neighborhood over the years that I’ve kind of used it up photographically speaking, but a lot of the businesses have bright LED lights, and I knew it would be a good, easy shoot. I arrived in Chinatown right before sunset, and my first shots have a twilight-gray feel I quite like. It was really pouring for much of the time I was shooting-the waterproof jacket I was wearing turned out to be not as waterproof as advertised, and I was soaked to the skin by the time I was finished. I didn’t mind, I’ve always enjoyed walking in the rain, and it was a warm night, so it actually felt really good.

Here’s the best of what I shot.

Weekly Shooting Excursion II: Rainy Blue Island Night

A few days after I pushed myself out the door to shoot along Olde Western Ave. in Blue Island, I went on my second 'make myself go out shooting to stay sane during the pandemic' shoot. This one was spontaneous-rain storms moved in to the area right as it was getting dark, and I love shooting in a city on a rainy night, so I grabbed my camera and returned to Blue Island. This time, I stuck to the downtown area, a stretch of Western Ave. a few blocks long. I’d done this same thing-shooting in Blue Island on a rainy night-almost exactly two years previously, and while I didn’t want to repeat myself, I knew I’d get good shots there, and it’s close to home. Comparing these to the photos I shot two years ago, I’m pretty happy. There was more rain during this shoot, leading to wetter streets and more light reflecting around. I think I’m also better at post processing now, especially minimizing the annoying orange-yellow hue produced by the street lights in many cities (Chicago is in the middle of a multi-year plan to replace all it’s street lights with LED lights, which are more energy efficient and more neutral in color, so that might not be an issue much longer).

Here are my favorites from this shooting excursion. 

Madison Rainy Night

I was in Madison, Wisconsin for a weekend getaway over Thanksgiving this year. The weather was terrible the entire weekend, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of the sleepy college town vibe. Holiday weekend and no home football game meant the town was pretty empty. The bad weather actually worked in my favor on Saturday evening. We were about to walk the few blocks from our hotel to the restaurant we had chosen for dinner, when we noticed it was pouring. Really pouring, with periods of hail as well. I grabbed my camera, and made a couple shots right as we were leaving the hotel (the first shot at the top of this page), but then waited until after dinner, when the rain had slowed some, to make the rest of the photos you see here. Rainy nights are really fun to shoot, and it rarely happens that there's a rainy night when I'm in an interesting location, have the time to shoot, and actually feel like sloshing around with wet feet to make some photos.