The virtues of a rainy day

So a few days ago, it was raining. Now I’m not sugarcoating a rainy day; it’s very wet, cold and the thing about photography in the rain is that more often than not you have to use your bare hands for the fiddly bits; meaning your hands go numb and your fingers freeze off.
But it was absolutely beautiful out there; the crystal clear droplets shattered as they hit the ground, sending shards of glowing light in multiple directions – the constant and relentless pitter-patter of water from the heavens drowned out the every day hustle and bustle of dreaded human civilisation, the world seemed to dissolve into fresh, clean, cold liquid, soaking the muddy ground and pooling in the gaps and crevasses of formerly dry bark and stone. Rain seems to cleanse the world, washing away the sticky, smoky pestilence of urbanisation and restoring the natural beauty and valour of rivers, streams and lakes around the region.

A sufficient soaking and out comes the stalk eyed head of a ravenous garden snail, and the soft bodied slug. Both are fascinating and beautiful in their own right (even if some don’t agree!), one footed aliens of the undergrowth, steadily chomping their way to adulthood all whilst patiently moving at a snails pace. Perfectly round globes of iridescent liquid settle on the tips of green hued stems and branches, some sliding gracefully to the edges but most shattering into smaller of their kind – just some of the many virtues exhibited on a rainy day.

Cold and wet calls to the amphibians and molluscs like it does to no other, the frogs and newts, sleek bodied beings, slide up and down their water-slicked stony homes and liquid lairs; I’ve not seen many a newt this year so far, but the few that have shown their heads are fabulous creatures, perhaps rivalled by only one other – the eel (of which I have sadly seen none this year so far).

But unbeknown to most are the great benefits to the photographer of the rain – the drips, crystals and splashes make the most fantastically magical pictures, each if viewed from a different angle telling a different tale.

You’ve got to be patient. Trudging around in the expanses of a patch, where even the birds are heard and not seen, may not be the most appealing of experiences, but the fruits of this can only ever be achieved by waiting. Sometimes it may take more than ten shots of exactly the same event in order to get the correct photograph; I stood for about twenty minutes trying to bring out the best I could in a photograph of water dripping it’s way down the craggy bark of a tree – the sharpness, shadow, clearness and liquidised movement of water is something that can sometimes be very hard to capture indeed.

Even after all of that I still only managed a few shots of what I believed to be the optimum captures of that day, here are a few of the pictures I managed to capture on that day: