It started to rain the other evening. The sudden kind of downpour you get in the summer when the sun is actually still shining but one black cloud unloads right above you for a fast drenching and then leaves just as fast. That's what happened here, I heard the rain, drops big enough to "thump", I grabbed my camera, ran upstairs and called to my daughter, "it's raining, do you want to come outside for some photos?" She came down just a minute later but the rain was already coming to an end. I got a few shots where you could see the last few seconds of recordable drops. Nothing much in most of the shots, but this one was what I was hoping to get. I was shooting into the sun to get that magic backlight and handholding an SB-800 flash set to 1/64 AAL (at arm's length) to camera left, pointing back at her to fill the shadows that the backlighting causes in the front. The flash also froze the movement of those last few raindrops. She had spread her arms outwide, feeling the rain and it all came together to make one shot I love.
Not too much in the processing department, but the small changes were significant. I balanced everything to taste (like cooking, ha ha, 'season to taste') in camera RAW, then opened in Photoshop. There I converted to LAB where I dealt with some noise in B, increased contrast, ran a couple favorite TRA actions (Get Faded-Warm and Oh Snap), highlighted a few areas of hair and adjusted sharpness.
