Yesterday The day before I wrote this we got a bit of rain, though not enough, and certainly nothing to match the 10+ inches from a week or two ago; so I quickly shot some pix before the bloodsucking fiends drove me back indoors. —I was lucky: so many people were flooded out our county evidently qualified for assistance, but aside from the mosquitoes we just had a damp strip in our basement, where the new sewer line (& thus, less dense concrete) was put in.
Daylily. sony IlCE-7C, tamron 70–180mm lens, 1/1250s, f/2.8, ev -0.7, iso100 focal length 180mm, daylight balance; cropped, rotated, some other futzing about with gimp...think I actually did shadow lifting this time around...?
One of the things I like about the tamron lens is the bokeh'ed waterspots, and this slightly earlier photo I liked even better, though technically I guess it's not as strong:
Daylily. sony IlCE-7C, tamron 70–180mm lens, 1/1250s, f/2.8, ev -0.7, iso100 focal length 180mm, daylight balance; cloned, shadows/highlights applied, cropped...
I'm all about the blur, I guess—I really liked the weird shape of the water droplets on the left side of the image.
For years my go-to tools for (jpg) image editing were: crop, scale, &, under colour adjustment, the curves tool, which is incredibly powerful, with the clone and smudge tools for cleanup. Lately, however, I've been playing with the shadows/highlight tool, in this case to try and bring out the green background: despite the darkness of these pix, it was a bright, hazy day when I took the photographs (around noon, actually).
Turns out this tool has a number of modes, and while playing with them, I ended up darkening the background; but that seemed to emphasize the quality of the photo I found appealing, to the point of spending some time cloning some background above the pistil, which is actually slightly cut off in the original image (& thus an unacceptable composition as is).
So I went with that.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
