What do you do when a client calls up for a last minute job, it's the weekend and it's an exterior shot of a building and the weather is lousy?
This was my dilema this weekend when I was asked to shoot some pictures for a cover shot for a glossy magazine. My brief was to get a picture of the new Public building http://www.thepublic.com/index.php in the West Midlands and the shots by first thing Monday morning. As I was not shooting a wedding this weekend I thought that sounds OK, until I checked out the weather forcast. http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/
A blanket of rain right across the UK - it must be summer!
I had hoped to shoot first light, the light is softer at 5 in the morning and there are not usually too many people or vehicles around to get in the way of the picture, unfortunately all I saw was a wall of rain.
I had another assignment booked in at the National Memorial Arboretum http://www.thenma.org.uk/ for later in the morning and this too took place under a blanket of rain. The Care of Police Survivors http://www.ukcops.org/ day is a moving ceremony to commemorate police officers who have died whilst on duty. The service is attended by the Chief Constables from around Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as the Home Office Minister .
After I had finished working at the Arboretum I did another weather check and realised that I may have a window of a few minutes before the second deluge appeared and washed away my cover shot for good. I got to the Public and the sky was thunderous and overcast but the rain was just holiding off so I shot as rapidly as I could using my canon 5d http://www.canon.co.uk/for_home/product_finder/cameras/digital_slr/eos_5d/index.asp and my 24-70mm and 80-200mm zoom lenses. I was lucky, I managed to circle the building and get a selection of pictures just before the rains returned for the rest of the day. I had the shots but they were taken in low lighting conditions so when I returned to my studio I new I was in for some extra work in post processing. The shots you see here are a couple from the final selection - the 'sun' was added in later and the colour temperature was lifted to warm up the final image.
A happy result on a weekend when it may have been preferable to draw the curtains and take a hot bath
