Why do raindrops look like sticks? I always thought that raindrops look like this emoji .
But today, I shot it in slow-mo (see on YouTube), and they look more like sticks.
Was it some light effect of my camera, or do they really look like that? And if it's the real deal, why do they look like that?

Edit: I found another video that I took from that rain. I didn't see it at first, but after looking again, it shows rain drops as little balls.
I took the videos 10 min apart. The second video(with balls) is when the rain just started.
Why does the rain look like sticks in one video and like balls in another? I used the same camera to record it.

Screenshot at 00:00:18
 A: When I look at individual frames, raindrops look like little white lines about 10 to 20 times as long as they're wide. I think that's how far they fall while one frame is being taken. Maybe some of them are farther away than others, and that makes the length difference.
If you see a series of frames like that, they're going to look like long lines.
I thought while looking at it that some particularly bright ones looked more like sticks than the others, but I didn't find the frames they were in. Maybe they were bright because they were closer, so they were just longer and wider lines.
But I'd consider the possibility that maybe sometimes you get something that isn't an individual raindrop. Imagine you were in a small airplane and you poured a cup of water. Air resistance would quickly spread it out. But maybe some of it would tend to stay together some. You could get some big blobs that followed each other, the leader breaking up the air resistance some for later ones?
So you might see something that wasn't just a random raindrop, but something more, that lasted longer, that your eye might connect?
I can imagine it, but I didn't look long enough to see whether it was there.

The experimental evidence supports JEBs claims. With a vertical wind tunnel blowing fast enough to keep water droplets stationary, they make the shapes he describes. You can see it for yourself.
video of falling water droplets
So if inside real clouds, the only forces involved are gravity, air pressure, and surface tension, and the water droplets don't interact with each other, then these are the only shapes they'll have.
The only other force that I know is involved is electric charge, and I'd expect that to be mostly inside the clouds and not for large raindrops on the way down. And I can't think of any interactions that would make a difference. So my guess is that those are the shapes. Though there could be something I haven't thought of.
I remember looking at thick shampoo in transparent bottles. I'd turn them over and air bubbles would travel to the top in raindrop shapes. That's because the air bubbles didn't have much surface tension at all. Water has so much surface tension that you won't see a raindrop tail.
The earlier video is different.






It's like with the other one it did slow scans, and this time it does quick scans that sometimes record the same raindrop in two places.
A: Your shutter speed is too slow, and you are seeing the raindrops travel within each video frame. Falling raindrops are approximately spherical. The teardrop shape sometimes occurs in droplets moving across a surface, such as a raindrop on glass (or, I suppose, a teardrop on a person’s face).
A: Small raindrops are roughly spherical. As they get larger, they flatten (see figure).

Even larger raindrops are unstable, and break up:

(figures from https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/shape-of-a-raindrop).
For spherical rain drops, Mie theory is used for computing a radar cross section (measured in dBZ, which is a log-10 scale of $10\times\ {\rm mm^6/m^3}$, one of the strangest units in science, IMHO). The larger drops' asymmetric shape can be retrieved by comparing horizontal and vertical radar cross sections.
A: Photographic sensor, camera sensor, film... all integrate the light received during the exposure time. The brightness and color of each pixel depends on the sum of all the light received during the exposure. So if an object moves during the exposure, it will look blurred, like this car. The background is stationary, so it is not blurred.

This is called "motion blur". The amount depends on how far it moves during the exposure. If it doesn't move more than one pixel, then the photo will be very sharp. Playing with the shutter time setting on the camera can give completely different results. On the left, a short exposure time "freezes" the subject. On the left, a long exposure time turns every drop into a long streak, for a more artistic look.

The video you show was shot with a rather long exposure time, which means the drops are affected by motion blur, and they look like streaks. Here's a picture of water drops shot with a short exposure time:

