After a dry spell we suddenly received a large amount of rain in a short time, and sitting at home listening to that rain patter on the roof inspired me to sort through and process a number of photographs from April of 2023 when my father and I drove over the Blue Ridge Mountains on Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park in the rain.

Photographing From the Car

The day hadn’t begun raining (in fact, I’d just photographed my first white trillium flowers about an hour before creating these photos), and it didn’t end that way, either. But for parts of the day we had the pleasure of winding down the Blue Ridge Mountains through anything from a light and misty rain to a heavy downpour with gusty winds. Being the passenger that day enabled me to create these photographs.

I would often watch the windshield wipers and time my exposures for just after they wiped the water off the windshield. This gave me the clearest view. But in some of the photos you can see droplets of water on the windshield. They create a slight blur that, when there are enough droplets, almost gives the photo a slightly more painterly look that I enjoy.

Camera Settings

From a technical perspective, it was a bit dark because of the rain and we were in a moving car so I wanted a high enough shutter speed to avoid too much motion blur (except in those instances when I played around with purposefully slowing down the shutter speed). This meant I used a fairly high ISO, between 1250 and 2000. I also used a reasonably wide aperture of f/5.0, which did limit the depth of field but helped give me a shutter speed of anywhere from 1/125th to 1/400th of a second. I was using a 16-80 mm lens (thanks, Alex) in the 44-56 mm range, chosen based on the view from inside the car.

Post-Processing

I did process these photos a fair bit in Adobe Lightroom, largely dodging and burning (old darkroom terms for brightening and darkening) to highlight some areas and lessen the impact of others. For example, I liked the light greens and browns of spring so I brightened those up enough that they stood out, and I darkened wet branches to help them stand out more. I added a little contrast in some areas that had been reduced by the rain.

What do you think of the results? Did I go too far? Would you have gone a little further? Let me know in the comments below.

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