Rainy Landscapes Through the Windscreen
Taken from inside the car, the rain on the windscreen adds to the abstract nature of this landscape image in the rain.
The most comfortable bad weather photography ever!
Rain. The nemesis of landscape photographers everywhere. But it doesn’t have to be. What if I told you there’s a way we can still venture out on rainy days and capture some different landscape images to what we’re used to seeing?
Landscape photography often relies on an interesting sky. In landscape photography, we’re not looking for flat or bright blue skies. Landscape photography often benefits from some ‘interesting’ weather in the sky, some clouds that let a ray of sun through, or menacing storm clouds over a colourful vista. But rain isn’t appreciated when we’re actually trying to get those shots.
That’s not to say photographing in the rain is impossible. A good camera rain cover, a decent lens hood, some sturdy waterproof boots, trousers, jacket, hat, gloves and all should be good.
Or, you could do as I did this past November and get in the car, stay warm and dry and utilise the rain on your windscreen to create abstract landscapes in a colourful countryside location. Utilising the weather given to us, the beauty and clarity of nature can be transformed into an abstract canvas of colour and movement as water runs down and interacts with the tiny imperfections of a car windscreen.
Using the rain on a car windscreen, landscape photography becomes more about colours and textures. Natural colours merge and distort as the rain runs down the screen with only points of clarity and focus.
For this type of abstract landscape photography on rainy days, we ideally need a landscape that offers us some colours within the scene. Autumn / Fall is ideal, as the trees, grasses and heathers are all changing for the season. That’s not to say you can’t achieve this type of shot in Spring or Summer. You may have to find a field of flowers or similar to get those abstract colours, and rainy days may be fewer and farther between. Unless you live in the UK of course…
The other benefit of this type of landscape photography is that there isn’t the requirement to hike long distances with all your equipment. Some people aren’t able to walk great distances. Others just don’t like the idea of a three-hour hike with all their kit for the chance of a good shot. With this technique, some simple online planning and maybe a scouting trip can get you out of the house capturing unique and atmospheric images, rather than sitting at home wishing you lived somewhere more photogenic.
For these shots, I drove to Eryri National Park, aka Snowdonia. I knew of a single-track road that cuts off the main A5 and winds for about two miles through a mountain pass. On the route, there are forests, steep cliffsides, lots of heathers and many smaller trees all changing colour for the season. There are also some animals wandering the hillsides and a farm or two.
The road used to take these images. The mountain ranges rise either side of the track and you can see natures colours changing as winter approaches.
Pulling into various lay-bys on the quiet track, I was able to assess the scene in front of me and the potential of rain hitting the screen as I wanted it to. One of the first things I realised was the need for a lens hood. This was for two reasons. Firstly I didn’t want to get too close to the screen, causing the glass to fog from my breath. Also, as the rain distorts the view through the screen, any highlights in the sky interact with the water and can cause some unwanted distortion on the lens. I ended up using a longer lens than I had first anticipated. I settled on a 110mm lens on my Fujifilm GFX 100s. This focal length ensured I didn’t get any of the car in the shot and also compressed the scene a little for me, meaning less cropping in post-processing.
As the rain got heavier, the photographic landscapes increasingly resembled watercolours. I love this shot.
To get a useable shutter speed and f-stop I needed to set the iso to 800, as the day was quite dull with a lot of heavy rain clouds hanging around the mountains of Eryri National Park.
I converted a couple of the shots to black & white, and I think the drama still works without the colour. Some of the shots didn’t work as I’d hoped, but I still managed to get some atmospheric images along the short track I’d found.
Of course, these types of shots won’t appeal to everyone, but I think they’re quite interesting and I’ll be trying this again in other locations.
Raindrops on the windscreen cause only parts of the scene to appear in focus.