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Friday Slide Show: Blossoms in the Rain
5 April 2019
If you've been following the bouncing ball here this week, you know we weren't very happy with the images of cherry blossoms we took on a rainy day earlier this week. And yet here they are, featured in our weekly slide show.
Are we nuts? Or merely bereft of options? Or maybe a little too cocky for our own good and your amusement?
None of the above (at least in regard to these images).
Instead, we thought we'd illustrate our contention that editing is half the fun of photography. Fortunately you no longer have to roll up your sleeves to avoid caustic chemicals when you dive into the soup of image editing. We roll up our sleeves anyway. Excellent delaying tactic.
Given our pedestrian images, we launched Lightroom and got to work.
The camera got wet, the lens got wet (but not the filter), we got wet. But we all survived.
We always start with a boost in Clarity, which seems to immediately improve what our decades-old gear captures. Then we slightly lighten our Shadows, which always take a hit with Clarity.
And then we open our eyes to look at the image.
In this case, we did a lot of cropping, which explains the odd sizes of the images. We also resorted to the Tone Curve tool to squeeze out some detail between the highlights and the midtones.
Things started to shape up at that point. By which we mean, we started to like what we were looking at.
It was raining when we took these. And between trying to keep the camera and lens dry under our parka and getting a peek through the viewfinder from under our hood, it wasn't much fun.
The camera got wet, the lens got wet (but not the filter), we got wet. But we all survived.
We shot a few images at f11, which gave us a shutter speed too slow for the lens image stabilization to avoid blur. But why were we doing that? We wanted to isolate the blossoms so we should have been shooting wide open, which we did as soon as our knucklehead attack passed.
We culled the abject failures, one of which we desperately wanted to include but, after a stern talking to with ourselves, we cut.
But these blossoms were shot in the rain, not on a bright sunny day with a blue cerulean sky for a background, and there's nothing we can do about that. The rain is part of the portrait. And the portrait is consequently a bit dull.
Still it renews our faith in failure. We can hardly wait to try something stupid again. No doubt we'll come up with something very soon.
