Do you skip out on Rainy Day Photography? If you do, then you are missing out. If you go out on rainy days, you already know the secret. The secret is simple: rainy days make for great photography. This is especially true when photographing waterfalls.

Earlier this week, I did a one-on-one photo workshop with someone flying to the north shore from Florida. As I watched the weather, I saw that the first day she was going to be here was going to rain. I reminded her to bring rain gear and lots of it. During that day of rainy day photography, we shot several waterfalls.

With waterfalls, the rain soaks the rocks next to the water, and that soaking turns the rocks darker and more colorful. Any of the green and orange lichen covering the basalt or rhyolite becomes even more colorful than it normally is. The overcast sky creates a huge softbox that controls the contrast and allows for detail in both the highlights and shadows. The foliage on trees turns bright green.

Here are a few tips:

• Use a polarizer. A polarizer helps remove reflections from the surfaces from your subject. It works just like polarized sunglasses. Because rainy days have gray skies, the majority of the reflection will be gray. This saps color from your scene and makes everything look blah. By adding the polarizing filter, you avoid that blah look. Check out the two images below the bullet points as an example. The first is polarized and the second isn’t.
• Have a soft cotton cloth with you to dry up water droplets on your lens and filters. Cotton can scratch glass so make sure to be gentle and use only the softest cloth.
• Dress extra warm and wear good rain gear. The more comfortable you are the more likely you will stay out longer and get great shots.
• Cover your camera with a rain cover. Check out all these options on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2IeQXGz [ad link].
• Use an umbrella and bring a friend to hold it.
• Go shoot waterfalls. There isn’t a better time to shoot waterfalls than a rainy, overcast day.
• Just get out there! It is so easy to sit inside during a rainy day and read a book by the fire, but the best shots can be taken on a rainy day.

Rainy Day Photography Gallery

Here are a few more shots from a day of photographing waterfalls in the rain.