Bad Weather Photography Quiz – Test Your Photography Knowledge

Rain coats surfaces with a smooth layer of water. Light reflecting off that layer gives deeper colors and richer contrast, and pavement turns into a mirror for lights and signs. Wet surfaces do not always form perfect reflections, but they almost always look more saturated than dry ones.

Raindrops fall fast, so freezing them takes a short exposure of about 1/500 second or faster. Slower speeds like 1/60 or 1/15 turn each drop into a long streak, and a 2 second exposure makes the rain nearly disappear. Fast shutter speeds work best with the drops backlit against a dark background.

On a rainy day the scene is often dull and gray, so umbrellas become strong graphic shapes. Their round forms, repeating patterns, and bright colors stand out against the muted background and give the eye a clear focal point. They are a compositional element in the frame, not just protection.

Camera meters are calibrated to render any scene as middle gray. Snow is far brighter than middle gray, so the meter reduces exposure to compensate, making the snow appear as a muddy gray rather than white. The photographer must override this tendency.

Applying positive exposure compensation overrides the meter's tendency to darken bright scenes. Adding one to two stops shifts the exposure upward enough to push the snow back toward white without clipping highlight detail to a featureless blown-out brightness.

Snow is much brighter than middle gray, so a correctly exposed snow scene has most of its data toward the right side of the histogram. The data should stop short of the right edge, because a spike there means the highlights are clipped and the snow has lost texture. A centered histogram usually means gray, underexposed snow.

Fog hides distant clutter and makes objects fade in tone the farther away they are. That leaves the main subject standing out and turns the background into soft, receding layers. Fog lowers contrast rather than increasing it, which is why edges look softer, not crisper.

A lens hood sticks out in front of the lens and blocks raindrops that are not falling straight at it. It keeps many drops off the front element, especially when the camera is tilted slightly down. Sensor size, aperture, and stabilization do nothing to keep water off the glass.