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The Wet Geranium
14 May 2020
April showers, it's said and sometimes sung, bring May flowers. So what do May showers bring? We suppose we'll find out in June. Meanwhile we couldn't resist snapping a shot of our freshly sprinkled 17-year-old geranium.
Geranium. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42 II R fitted with +4 and +10 Lensbaby macro converters at 16mm (a 32mm equivalent) and f3.6, 1/200 second and ISO 200. Processed with a significant crop in Adobe Camera Raw and dialed back with a monochrome overlay at 10 percent.
We never water it and while we do, once in a while, give it a haircut, it's really had a life of its own. Hardy is the word for it.
We probably spent more time editing the image this morning than we have on the plant all year.
And we did spend some time on it.
After Adobe Camera Raw applied our default edits to whatever comes out of the Olympus E-PL1, we made something of a severe crop to the image. Considering it was a +14 macro shot to begin with, that was rather bold. But we hadn't had our coffee yet.
We've mentioned the difficulty of capturing reds before, at least in cameras as old as ours. And magentas fall in the same troublesome spectrum.
So once again we applied a cure for the oversaturation, mild though it was from the overcast lighting. This time, instead of a gradient map, we used a monochrome adjustment layer.
That's really the same thing but it gives us control over individual hues. And we had a second hue in this image we wanted to darken independently.
Turns out you don't need coffee to make a lot of intelligent editing decisions.
The reason we indulged in the severe crop was simply because we consider the subject of this shot not the fading petals of the flower but its pistol and the dark lines inviting visitors in.
We're not sure why that makes us grin in these days of quarantine. Imagine, inviting someone in. For, say, coffee.