Shooting Street Photography in Heavy Rain

Shooting street photography in the rain sounds miserable until you see what it actually produces. Hong Kong in a full thunderstorm gives you reflections, umbrellas, chaotic traffic, and strangers too focused on staying dry to notice a camera in their face.

Coming to you from Mike of North Borders, this rain-soaked street photography video follows a full day of shooting through Hong Kong's Central district and Kennedy Town during what turned out to be seven consecutive days of storms. The main camera is the Sony a1 II, and before even stepping outside, he stops at a convenience store to buy electrical tape to cover the hot shoe, which he calls the most vulnerable part of the camera in wet conditions. It's a small detail, but if you shoot in the rain without thinking about it, that can be exactly where water gets in. The lens of choice for most of the day is the Sony 28-70mm f/2, which he repeatedly comes back to after testing the Sony 16-35mm and deciding it runs too wide for what he's after on the streets.

One of the more practical things he talks about early on is what happens when you get overwhelmed on a busy street with too much to shoot. His fix is simple: pick one thing. Focus on a color, a shape, a type of shot. He zeroes in on yellow buses, red taxis, puddle reflections, and people framed by umbrellas. That kind of intentional narrowing is easy to skip when the streets are this alive, but it's what separates a chaotic card full of snapshots from a set of images with actual coherence. He also makes a point about using pedestrians walking through the frame as an asset rather than a problem, particularly when they're carrying umbrellas that naturally push the composition together.

The Sony 50-150mm f/2 stays in the bag for most of the day because he wants to keep the buildings in frame, not compress them out. There's also a moment where he switches to manual focus to shoot through a misty window, pointing out that no autofocus system, regardless of how advanced, can reliably lock through condensation onto a subject behind glass. The flip screen on the a1 II comes up as genuinely useful for low-angle shots in the rain, not just as a convenience feature.

Later in the day, he boards a tram to Kennedy Town, which turns out to have a well-known overpass spot that looks particularly strong in wet conditions. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Mike.