Taking photos in a downpour is a major challenge – not to mention potentially dangerous to the camera gear. But I’ve just stumbled across a set of photos that perfectly illustrate why sometimes the best photographs are the most challenging ones.
Patrick Smith (@patricksmithphotos), a sports photographer working with Getty Images, turned a recent “torrential downpour” into an opportunity for dazzling mid-game portraits of the Detroit Tigers and Baltimore Orioles.
Last month, when the Tigers traveled to Baltimore, the skies opened up in what Smith describes as a “downpour.” Instead of trying to shield his lens from the droplets, Smith appears to have embraced the rain, taking shots from a low angle that allowed the rain to gather on his lens.
The stadium lights hitting those droplets turned the rain into a dramatic flare and dotted the images with bokeh. Rather than wiping off his lens, Smith turned towards where players waited on deck, creating striking photos that were taken in the middle of a professional baseball game, yet felt more like creative portraits than sports photography.
According to the photo’s metadata, Smith took the shots with the Canon EOS R1 – a mirrorless camera that is, thankfully, weather-sealed. However, Smith also used the Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 STM, a budget wide-angle that isn’t weather-sealed and typically needs extra protection to work in the rain.
But, that ultra-wide perspective allowed the photographer to surround the players in a sea of rain-created bokeh and flare.
Smith used a mix of different settings for the shots. In shots dotted with shaped bokeh, he used a narrower f/13 aperture to help define the shape of the bokeh and turn the stadium lights into starbursts.
In another shot with more abstract-shaped lens flare, he used an f/2.8 aperture and ISO 2000 in order to freeze the rain in the background into droplets at 1/2000th of a second shutter speed.
The game wasn’t the first time Smith had turned bad weather into a golden opportunity for unusual sports photography. I previously came across Smith’s work while browsing through photos of the 2026 Winter Olympics, where Smith turned snow into a dramatic framing tool, along with using techniques like shutter drag.
I’m impressed both by the way Smith has managed to turn challenging weather into a framing tool – and the fact that he shot what look like portraits in the middle of an MLB game.
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