Standing in the rain

We’re having what the forecasters and newscasters are calling a cold weather snap at the moment, but as inconvenient as snow, ice and cold winds may be, they’re preferable in my book to the heavy driving rain that can sometimes dominate our winters.   Although the heaviest rain I’ve experienced in recent years was not during winter in Ireland, but during autumn in Rome in 2008.  It stress-tested my camera’s weather proofing, and gave me a nice (if wet) photo opportunity.

Aoife and I were in Rome for our first anniversary – it was on the same visit that I photographed the Forum – and we decided, as you do when in Rome, to pay a visit to the Vatican.  As we arrived, we noticed a huge gathering of these guards, dressed in different uniforms and organized in lines, standing to attention.  A crowd, mainly tourists,  had gathered to watch and we joined them – the expectation was that the guards were waiting for the Pope to pass by, and a trip to the Vatican that included a glimpse of the Pope was surely going to be worth a few minutes wait, even if just to be able to say that you saw him.

We waited.  It started raining.  We waited some more.  It started raining more heavily.  We waiting even longer.  It rained even heavier. Torrential in fact – as you can see in the photo, it was literally bouncing off the ground.  By this stage we were drenched, my camera was wet (despite being under my jacket for most of the time) and it was generally pretty miserable.  At least we had a little bit of respite from (admittedly pathetic) umbrellas – those soldiers were out in the worst of it, for a good twenty minutes.  The thunder overhead didn’t give much confidence that it was going to stop soon.  It did ease off though, and eventually the Pope drove past in a convoy of vehicles and I snapped a few shots as he went past.  I might post one some day, though they’re notable only for the fact that the Pope is in the frame, and not for their photographic qualities.

This shot I do like though, and if you look closely you can see I’ve captured a moment where one of the guys near the left edge of the frame obviously got some water in his eyes, or one of those really big drops of rain ran down his neck, and he is doing a top quality grimace.

The composition could be better, but I couldn’t change my position, or ask them to rearrange themselves, so I had to make do with this view.  The camera survived the downpour, and the high shutter speed (achieved by controlling ISO and aperture) allowed me to freeze the rain drops and capture some sense of the volume of water that was falling at the time.