After the rain

Over the last three months, we have had some gorgeous warm, sunny weather, but, correspondingly, very little rain. Everything is starting to get very dry, so it was something of a relief when the weather  decided to provide us with a long slow soak over Sunday and Monday.

By yesterday evening, the rain had stopped so I took the opportunity to get out in the garden and make some pictures of where the rain had fallen on some of our plants.

Just for fun*, I thought I would take the diametrically opposite approach to the one in my last post. So, this time I decided only to use techniques that could be emulated in a darkroom, and also go for very restricted depth of field. So, no focus stacking, just moderate to wide apertures, monochrome, and a little toning and contrast adjustment in Lightroom.

*98% for fun; 2% because the intense green of the foliage overwhelmed the graphical elements and textures, thus monochrome.

Edit 12 June 2011. It rained again.

I think normal weather service is resumed here in Kent. I'll just keep adding pictures to this post when I get any, to avoid a proliferation of fundamentally similar posts.

Some more from one of our Spirea bushes. I find the water droplets on them fascinating: the leaf surfaces must be quite hydrophobic because a lot of the droplets make little balls, held up by surface tension. Surprisingly different from our bay bush, for instance: that has shiny waxing looking leaves, but the water tends to spread over them more, and is not repelled by the surface so much.

Still raining!

Yesterday - 17 June - it rained all day. Not so much after the rain, as getting soaked taking pictures while it poured.