Rain

[SimonW]

Last year our society's annual barbecue was cancelled due to forcast rain - and as it turned out just as well. This year we promised that it would NOT be cancelled. And so we went ahead in rain so torrential we thought it might drown us. (Actually, since it stopped snowing this year the rain has been almost constant, curtailing a lot of my photography, so we really should have known better.)

Anyway, I've learnt that I need more practice, and perhaps some advice, about photographing rain. My compact, with a fairly slow shutter speed, really didn't show it like it was - huge drops crashing off the car roof, and so thick one could hardly see through it. Maybe a very fast shutter speed to catch the drops would be better, or maybe a burst of flash to freeze them?

Rain Again

(Perhaps rain would be a good topic for the weekly competition - setting it might ensure that no-one saw any that week!)

[anglefire]

Rain? Almost no rain this year - plants are suffering 

[Markulous]

Capturing rain is not so much about shutter speed as focus and closeness. If you think about it, looking out over a rainy valley it all looks like a grey mist - it's looking closer that you can see more of the individual drops. So it tends to be focus in close(ish) with maybe an OOF dark(ish) BG. A slower shutter tends to give rain "tracks" making the drops more visible (and adding to the image, IMHO)

Edit: I can see a difficulty (or an extra challenge!  ) to using a compact and that's focus - it'll tend to AF on the BG and not the nearer raindrops. Although the inevitably greater DOF of a compact won't help matters either

Not rain but the same principle (admittedly helped by having reasonable light) - slow shutter and reasonably close (but again, helped by my not having any rain/waterdrops between me and subject to muddy the waters!) - dark BG helped by the panning to blur it