Tuesday 7 June 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. Nice set of photos Anthony. Now looking forward to the next rainy day so that I can try this out.

    Did you shoot in B&W or convert using Lightroom?

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  2. Hi Ian,

    These were all shot Raw and converted in Lightroom.

    One thing I find useful is to set the preview on the back of my camera to Monochrome: this means that from the very beginning I see them in B&W. But the B&W view is not preserved after they're imported into Lightroom (Lightroom doesn't read that information) so I just selected all in grid view and pressed v on the keyboard to convert to B&W. I added just a little tone using the HSL sliders, as well as using targeted adjustments to get the local contrast I wanted for each image.

    Thanks for your comment and question!

    Anthony.

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