I was sitting in the office yesterday afternoon, door open as normal and looking out through the opening spotted that it was raining.
All the cats took cover, unsurprisingly, but I ran upstairs, grabbed my camera and ran out to where a puddle had formed near the edge of the house.
The rain was hitting me on the back as I stooped over but I didn’t care. My thoughts were very on much on trying to focus on where the next drops might land.
The number of missed or blurred moments was substantial but then again, I would have expected as much. Trying to predict where a rain drop might land in a puddle is akin to figuring out where a lightning strike might occur across a vast dark sky.
Going through the images this morning, you have to skip through a lot of blurs and ignore them. It will eat you alive if you get caught up on that. It’s when you catch one that is in focus, you pause and look at the wonder that Mother Nature has allowed you to capture.
Most of those shots had focus that was almost perfect and therefore they became acceptable when the drop did something special like a ripple or a splash. Then there was one or two where the focus was absolutely spot on and I grinned ear to ear.
Anyway, I have attached a number of the shots at the end of the blog. Hope you get to check them out and enjoy!
In the meantime, the blog thought for today was all about rain and our reaction to it.
I have seen people behaving like cats and getting paralyzed somewhere in order to avoid it.
I have seen people bemoan it, cancel events over it, and complain how three drops on their shoulders amounts to a soaking.
I have seen other people embrace it and dance in it and I admire them for that.
Me, I look at rain and jump at the chance to do something in it. Much like yesterday, rain opens up a wealth of possibilities to a photographer and as long as we can manage to keep our lens dry, these possibilities sometimes produce wonderful images.
But beyond photography, there is an aspect to rain to where we have allowed it to become a negative euphemism.
We take rain checks, talk about people raining on our parade, complain about how when it rains it pours.
People like to have something to complain about. We will take something perfectly good like rain and complain about how it makes us wet, depresses our feelings, robs us of an activity (that involved dryness, I assume).
Yet rain itself is the very life source to this planet in the water it produces.
So how come we are so happy to malign it?
When we experience rain in our lives (physically or figuratively) we need to change our attitude and appreciate that each rain drop brings with it an opportunity for us to alter our path.
The only thing that perpetual sunshine creates is a desert and our lives need to be more than that.
Our lives are a mix of good times and bad times, successes and failures, opportunities and challenges. When it isn’t then we risk it ending up a barren wasteland that eventually just peters out on us.
Rain in our lives should be seen as a refreshing source of where our next road may lead us and while no one wants it to be always raining, its presence shouldn’t deter us from moving forward.
There are moments in the lives of many of us, where the rain seems torrential and we struggle to get a solid footing and move forward. Some reach for an umbrella or take cover and wait for the rain to pass.
But the better approach is to let it give us a soaking. Just continue the push and somewhere ahead, you will find a rainbow. You can always change and dry off, if you need to but knowing that you had to push through a rain storm in order to reach your destination, will make the destination itself all the more valuable when you find it.
… just a thought!
