It never rains

But it bloody lashes down. A cold, wet, dark November morning. Sane people are hiding in bed for at least another few hours.

The less sane are taking their prized veteran cars on the annual run from London to Brighton. And the really barking mad are heading into the storm to take photos of them.

I see them every year as they pass my house. It’s not exactly a difficult journey to get there. About thirty yards, roughly.

The experience brought home a few reminders of why shooting in these conditions is so very different from any others.

Firstly, shutter speed matters a huge amount. Not only are the cars moving, of course. But so is the rain. And you want to show that. Too fast a speed and the raindrops don’t show up so well, or if they do, they’re tiny dots. Too slow, and there’s just too much movement, sideways as well as downwards. Everything just becomes a soggy mess.

So you really want to be in full manual mode. You can see from these shots that I toyed between 1/125 and 1/200 of a second for exposure time. The aperture was mostly constant throughout the set at f/4.0 – the light was very overcast, and that meant using ISO between 800 and 1600 (this is outdoors, in daylight!) to get things looking right.

And in terms of composition, I like to try and get inside the car. Well, to capture the facial expressions and personalities of the occupants, anyway. So that meant mostly using the full length of the 70-200mm lens. The lens is a wonderful piece of equipment, and weather-sealed as a good pro lens should be.

The camera body was another story. Though I had a towel draped around my neck and over the top of the body and lens, I should really have done the whole plastic bag wrapping thing, as things got badly out of hand when the rain really started to pour down in biblical style. Lesson learned here. Fortunately, after a day in a rice box, the main dial started working properly again. (A good reason to have spare cameras to hand…)

A lens hood was essential – not for the sun glare it’s generally used for, but to stop too much rain directly settling on the lens glass itself. Even with this precaution, there came a point when the rain just could not be stopped (though I quite liked the giant bubble effect of a really tasty raindrop) and it was time to flee, for dry socks and a massive cup of tea. A much shorter set than usual, but definitely a memorable one. You can get an idea of the normal shooting conditions in this example from the 2010 event.

*What the Exif notes mean: this is detailed data about how the photo was taken–first, the focal length of the lens, then ISO (the sensitivity of the sensor: low number for bright conditions, high for dark or indoors), then f number (the size of the hole that lets the light into the camera: low = big, high = small), finally the exposure time (how long the shutter is open) in seconds.