A Splash of Colour

This shot came out of instinct more than planning. A night downpour had just passed, the roads were still gleaming, and I caught the moment a car ploughed through a puddle like it was carving a wound into the street. The camera barely kept up. What emerged isn’t a photograph of a car, or a street, or even rain—but the collision of light, speed, and water at their most chaotic.

From a technical standpoint, I wouldn’t call this “clean.” The headlights are blown to pure white. The motion blur—particularly on the car—is complete, to the point of abstraction. Detail is secondary, sacrificed to velocity. But for once, precision wasn’t the point. What matters is how the frame holds the flood of colour: sodium yellow on the kerb, electric cyan reflections on the wet tarmac, red tail lights bleeding into purple neon. This palette doesn’t exist in nature—it’s manmade, synthetic, jarring. That’s what makes it work.

Compositionally, the green strip in the foreground becomes the only stable line in a field of movement. It anchors the image, lets the viewer hold onto something before being pulled into the smear of headlights and distorted street reflections. Even the verticals—the poles, the signs—start to tilt under the force of speed and spray. The energy is unbalanced, unhinged. In that sense, it feels more like a painting than a photo.

Is it technically flawed? By conventional standards, yes. But in embracing those “flaws,” the image becomes truer to what the moment felt like. Wet, fast, loud. An optical mess. And oddly beautiful.