Light Through the Downpour

There is something incredibly special about a "sun shower"—that fleeting moment when the weather can't quite decide what it wants to do, so it does everything at once.

A “sun shower” at Johnstown Castle in Wexford. The weather couldn’t decide whether it wanted. The heavens opened, but the sun refused to disappear.

The trick to capturing rain on a smartphone is backlighting. If you shoot against a flat, grey sky, the raindrops disappear. But here, by facing the sun (partially blocked by clouds) and framing the shot against the darker, shadowed trees across the lake, every individual drop lights up like a spark.

In Snapseed, I leaned into the cold tones. I dropped the white balance temperature slightly to get those steel-blues in the water, which makes the warm burst of the sun feel even more intense.