Paris in the Rain

Woody Allen was right. Paris IS most beautiful in the rain. My favourite photo from the last year.

This was one of those elusive ‘perfect moments’ that I have only experienced a handful of times as a photographer. It was captured on a day which I had not expected to take any photos. A friend had arrived from London and we were showing her around Paris for the day. During the afternoon, a thunderstorm very suddenly appeared over the city. The deluge that followed caught almost everyone unawares. Umbrellas were useless against the horizontal wall of water that had girls screaming and everyone running full pelt to find some shelter. We eventually found respite at a construction site where the workers kindly allowed many wet and soggy people to stand under the scaffolding. After several minutes, I asked myself why I wasn’t out there in the rain photographing people’s reaction to all this. I spent the next 20 minutes in the autumn shower, soaked to the bone with water in my shoes, thunder and lightning cracking above. This image depicts the moment after the sea of clouds had parted to reveal the sun, backlighting the raindrops so that they appeared like a shower of diamonds in the air. These details really do need to be seen in the large version.