First Rain

The first significant rain of the season began this morning about 4:00am. Wind, thunder, lightning, and buckets of rain. By the time we got up a couple of hours later, the pool was close to overflowing and there were puddles of water everywhere. I thought I might get some lightning shots, so dug out my tripod and set up under the palapa. I soon realized that the sheet lightning did not photograph well, it just turned the cool pre-dawn blue sky a dull, lifeless grey. I gave up on those and concentrated on shooting the running rain with long exposures (image on the left). A large flash while the shutter was open produced the image on the right, separating those streams of water into individual drops.

Shortly after this capture, I realized I was standing in a couple inches of water with a metal tripod right next to me and large amounts of electricity all around. I made a hasty retreat to the relative safety of our apartment to watch the remainder of the storm.