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.
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