Shooting in the rain
Unless you live in the Atacama Desert, you’re pretty likely to find that it’s raining when you want to take photos occasionally. I recently headed to my local racing circuit partly to enjoy the racing and partly to see if I could get any photos of the cars… but it was raining heavily.
Unfortunately, rain and expensive electronic devices don’t mix too well. I got chatting to one of the racing teams’ photographers who showed me that there was a lot of condensation in the LCD screen on top of his camera. He could still take photos, it hadn’t completely ruined his camera, but he was concerned that he’d “got too much water in it” the previous day and wasn’t quite sure if it would dry out properly again. For my mind, any water is too much water… I don’t want to find my camera has died because of a short-circuit or some other water damage.
There are a number of professional camera jackets available that will protect your kit, but if you’re not in the mod for splashing out big money you can make something pretty effective yourself with a sheet of polythene (or a plastic bag), some electrical tape and a lens hood.
I used the packing bag from (believe it or not) a toilet seat to make my cover, but if you can get a polythene dust sheet you can also tape that into shape to make a bag. The bag I used was large enough to fit over my camera and lens with plenty of extra room. I wouldn’t recommend putting your head in the bag but that extra room meant there was less likely to be any snagging as I zoomed or focused the lens. I cut a hole in one side that was the same size as my lens hood, and then taped the lens hood into the hole with electrical tape – this let me have the camera inside the bag and provided a little extra protection against rain. On the other side I cut a small slit, removed the viewfinder cover from the camera, stretched the slit over the viewfinder and then put the cover back on. This meant that I didn’t need to lift the side of the bag up to look through the viewfinder and with a little care I could ensure no water got there.
So that was my very simple, and very cheap, camera raincover. It actually worked pretty well, although sometimes the bag would blow in front of the lens and obscure what I was trying to take a photo of… but at least my camera stayed dry!
There were still some problems, though, that you might encounter yourself while photographing in the rain. Wind, as I’ve already mentioned, would occasionally blow my raincover in front of the lens, but it would also blow rain onto the lens. This gives rise to blurry areas in your photographs and can confuse the autofocus system. Solution? Well, you could use a lens cloth to wipe it try every now and again… I used my t-shirt. Rain on my hands also caused condensation inside the bag which, while not a big problem, isn’t really desirable. If you’re doing this, try and keep your hands as dry as possible.
So that’s how I managed to take photos in the rain, but do you have any other tips? I’d guess it’s hard to take photos facing upwards? Or have I missed something altogether? Feel free to contribute in the comments!
If you enjoyed reading this why not buy me a coffee?