Rain in August

This morning it was raining, and that is always good for photography.

But photographing 'rain' is not easy, at least not for me. It is difficult to catch the water coming down, so I focus more on the effect it has on my surroundings.

It seemed that I had to do this in black & white, so I set the camera to BW (I use OOC JPEGS's if possible, Fuji X100s), ISO to 800.
I wanted to catch as much of the real rain as possible. I set the shutter speed to 1/60, not wanting to freeze the drops while they fall. That usually works.

So, I took quit a few shots of water running down, some wet asphalt, but it was not really happening. And I was getting wet.

I tried some cars and their headlights, but it was still not all that exciting.

After a while I had the feeling that I was not getting anything more, so I headed for home, not sure about the results. Maybe not today.

Going through the images, I found a few nice ones, but as I feared, it was not really there. No problem, it will rain again.
I decided to let it rest for a while.

At the end of the day I wanted to give it one more try. I had a feeling that there might be something there, I just had to find it.
So, I started fresh. Not black & white.
I started to reduce the colours, while playing with contrast and tonality.
I was on to something, this started to come together.

It took me a lot of tempering, first in my default raw developer Capture One, then some more in Photoshop, mainly sharpness and tonality, I hardly ever work with complicated masks and things like that.

I ended up with something that resembles something between a polaroid and an Agfachrome slide.