weather - How do you photograph rain?

What are recommended settings for my Nikon Coolpix P1 to best portray rain?

Here's what I got. No retouching was applied.

• The picture I took when the rain was heavy with the automatic settings:

  




• The picture I took with the "Sports" program; by then, however, the rain was not as hard.

  

  Ugh, ugly gray strip at the bottom, that was the flat surface I put my camera on to get a stable picture.

My main problem is that the actual rain and hailstorm is very hard to see in the picture. The overall effect is, instead, of fog.

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Follow-up from the thread, courtesy of more rain, now with less hailstorm and more thunder.

The feedback amounted to flash and faster shutter. I took a few photos and I'm having some trouble to reconstruct what I did to get each result. Two representative results:

• Fast shutter, with some guest starring:
  

  I'm talking about that horrible building obviously.



• Faster shutter and flash:
  
  

  Kinda difficult to say those pictures were taken sixty seconds of each other. :)

I'm not sure, however, that either of this is really an improvement of the original results.