Singing in the Rain

There are a handful of places at Disney that look especially beautiful in the rain, and a handful of evenings when it actually is raining and those places are accessible late at night when the crowds start to die down. This time of year, both of those things are even more rare—we're past the rainy season and parties and events like Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party at Magic Kingdom and Jollywood Nights at Hollywood Studios render the parks inaccessible after dark.

All that to say that when a monsoon rolled through this weekend and it was pouring down rain most of Sunday into the late night hours, as tired as I was, I knew I'd regret not dragging myself to Studios to see what I could do with the weather and my camera.

I got there close to 8:30 p.m. with the park closing at 9. The tollbooths were closed and I had to enter through the one spot that wasn't coned off. Parking was great since the lot was largely cleared, but from there on out it was just me, my umbrella, and my camera. I made my way through security and into the park and clutched my umbrella in my left hand and my camera in my right, seeing what I could grab and trying (unsuccessfully) not to get absolutely drenched in the process. I managed to keep my head and camera out of the worst of it but by the end my pants, socks, and shoes were so waterlogged that I must have been carrying around an extra 10 pounds.

All that said, I'd say it was worth it. The park was already fairly quiet because of the storm. I knew before I'd even gotten there from the wait times in the app that not a ton of people were in the park. And on top of that, it was Dapper Day...so many of the people who were there were dressed to the nines—including this anonymous woman making her way down Sunset. Sometime after 9 p.m., when the park officially closed for the night, I grabbed this shot—one of probably 100 that I took on Sunset Boulevard over the course of that hour. I walked around a bit but for the most part just stood on Sunset taking shot after shot, just waiting and hoping for a moment like this.

It got a fair amount of work in post-processing, removing all distractions but this lone park-goer, enhancing the lights and colors and reflections to bring them more in line with what my eyes saw. I dropped the clarity, too, to make it all look a little more like the dream it felt like in that moment. You can see the pouring rain and the reflections of the Tower of Terror and holiday decorations on the soaked street. It was exactly what I'd hoped for when I'd left the house that night.

It was one of those moments that I'll remember forever and a great reminder that half the battle is just showing up. My house was warm and dry. The kids were relaxing. We'd had dinner and cleaned up and everything in me just wanted to stay put where I was—but I knew a chance like this wasn't going to come along again soon, so I dragged myself out and I think we can all agree that it was the right decision. Taken at 35mm, 1/50 second, f/4.0, ISO 5000.