Long exposures in the rain

Tuesday 7 July 2026, 20:02 by Nando Harmsen | 1,495 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Long exposures can look beautiful when photographing rivers, surf or a waterfall. But what if it rains? Or when there is spray from a waterfall? How do you deal with that?

Water on the lens is usually unwanted. You can almost always see it straight away in the photo, especially when using small apertures. A single drop can usually be removed.

Photographing in the rain. Difficult, but not impossible. Not even with long exposures. Make sure you bring a tea towel.
When photographing long exposures, it becomes more difficult. Depending on the length of the exposure, it is no longer just one drop, but several drops. You can solve this with a tea towel and lots of photos.

If you use a short long exposure, somewhere between 0.5 and 5 seconds, you have to accept that drops will land on the lens. Or on the grey filter you are using. You cannot prevent this.

Take several photos. Somewhere between four and ten photos, depending on how hard it is raining or how much spray there is. After each photo, you need to rub the filter dry with the tea towel. Every time.

Four photos, each with an exposure of 1.6 seconds. After each photo, the lens was dried with the tea towel. I edited them extremely for this purpose, so that the drops can be seen clearly.
The drops are in a different place in each photo. That means that for every drop's position, there is always a photo without a drop in that spot. Use Photoshop or Affinity to combine the photos.

Open the photos as layers in Photoshop or Affinity, and mask out the drops. Make sure that all the photos have been edited in exactly the same way.
With layers and masks, you can remove almost every drop this way. Is there still one left? Then you can use the removal tools available to you.

The result of combining the four photos.
You can cover the camera and lens with filter with a tea towel. Make sure the exposure is set manually and that the focus is locked. Manual focus, in other words.

This allows you to pull the tea towel away and press the shutter button straight away. That works best and fastest. Do you first need to measure the exposure and focus? Then it takes too long.

With the tea towel, you can wait for the right moment without any problems.
This works well when it is not raining too hard, or when the spray from a waterfall is not too severe. Is it raining heavily, or are you standing completely in the mist from a waterfall? Then there is little else to do but wait for it to ease off.

A shutter speed of 0.8 seconds in the rain. It does not have to be a problem.
What do you do with very long exposures? Exposures lasting a minute or longer? In that case, you can quickly and lightly rub the tea towel over the filter during the exposure. Make sure the camera does not move.

An exposure of 244 seconds in light rain. I had to dry the drops on the filter every ten seconds.
In this case, it must not rain too hard. Otherwise, there is no keeping up with wiping. Perhaps a sheltered spot or an umbrella can help. In any case, look at the options available to you.

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