Ghosts about! One legged and keen to stay dry

Idling away the time this lunch hour I wondered how some long exposures would work in a town during rain. I expected the umbrellas to be prominent but didnt realise the people holding them would all but disappear. Just the one leg that was planted on the ground as I pressed the shutter tends to expose fully, the other, and often the whole body vanishing into thin air.

I would have loved to spend an hour trying to get shots like this but it needs to be raining of course otherwise there are no umbrellas up. It was a wee learning curve to get the effect I wanted;

At first I minimised the aperture (biggest number) to see what shutter speed that gave me (at base ISO obviously). One second was much too long - nothing to see of the people and rest of frame shaky from failure to hold camera still enough to avoid shake

So I switched to shutter Priority and chose half a second - still too long really

In the end I found that 0.25 to .3 of a second worked best, depending on how slow or fast the person walked by.

To try this out for yourselves you need
1) rainy weather enough for people to use umbrellas
2) a dry vantage point across the street or far enough away to get some background such as shop front in shot
3) tripod ideally or camera planted firmly against a wall or other immovable support

If you have a compact then you may be able to try this out by;
forcing the ISO to base (lowest number)
putting into landscape mode(to narrow the aperture)
waiting until it is getting close to dark (so shutter speed is already long)
forcing the flash off.

Later in the day it was tipping it down in Carlisle so I repeated the exercise as people walked home from work. I noted that brightly coloured umbrellas worked best as they stand out well against most backgrounds. If you have Live view its handy to leave the camera in that mode, pointed at the precomposed scene and be looking up and down the street for likely candidates to appear.

This was a great little experiment which I had loads of fun doing. As a bonus on my way home the sun returned and I got this rather pleasing image of my local golf course bathed in sun as the storm clouds, so deep grey they looked nearly blue, receded.