This may sound weird, but I love finding abandoned umbrellas in the city after a big storm. Especially if they are clustered in trash cans or lying prone on the street. They say something to me. I’ve wanted to get a certain kind of photo of an umbrella after a storm for a couple of years, but either I’m not in the city when a storm comes, or the timing is not good and the umbrellas are cleaned up before I can get to them. While I had missed numerous opportunities, I kept thinking about the image I wanted. Then it happened.
It was a warm January 2024 with minimal snow. A rainstorm was predicted (instead of the hoped-for snowstorm), and I was going to be on my way to work in Boston when it was raining. Perfect! I hemmed and hawed about whether I should bring my Canon camera, but opted not to because the storm was supposed to be pretty bad. I didn’t want to get my camera soaked. My phone camera would have to do.
On the final leg of my commute, I came out of the subway at the Copley Square and took a right onto Boylston Street. There, not 20 yards from station, was what I had been looking for—a dead umbrella. I almost walked right by it because it was raining so hard. But as I got to it the rain let up slightly, and my nylon and metal muse lay there, dormant and lonely, on the sidewalk. The umbrella was filled with water, heavy and prone, with only its shaft sticking up as if begging for someone to rescue it.
I took a shot of the umbrella just to get a quick one in the books. But that shot wasn’t enough. I needed more structure. I needed people. I needed two people. These are the things I had thought about previously, and the thoughts came to me quickly as I stood in the rain and waited for the right shot.
With very little waiting two people came along at the right time, at the right pace, and at the right distance. I shot bursts with my phone as they approached the umbrella, caught up to it, and then walked beyond it. The photo in this article is the best of the lot. I changed it to black and white because there was almost no color in the original, and the black and white gave a gloomy edge the the image.
Is this image perfect? Absolutely not. There are exposure and focus issues. Still, because of the thoughts and feelings that the image invokes as a photojournalistic street image, these technical factors don’t matter as much than if I was taking a portrait or shooting wildlife.
The photo did not take much effort to create. But the thinking that went into it over the past couple of years is what made it possible.