October 6, 2009 - Beauty amidst the rain

1/200

f8

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I hope this one is a treat!

Today I went out during lunch after a light rain to try to get some water droplet photos, and this time I think I found a real keeper. These were odd little flowers (all of the blooms are half-circles), but were beautiful and vibrant.

I shot them hand-held with my 18-55mm IS lens, which makes for a decent macro lens in a pinch (or on a tight budget, like me). The sky was still overcast, but there was plenty of light to get a good shutter speed and small-ish aperture (to increase depth of field), all while using a good ISO to avoid graininess.

Having shot in RAW, I loaded it into Photoshop Elements and used Adobe Camera Raw to do some post-processing. I actually lowered the exposure by a quarter and bumped up the vibrance to saturate the colors a little more.

Then I did something I usually don't do — instead of raising the clarity to help sharpen the image, I lowered it to make it appear softer. Then I sharpened just the water droplets in the focus zone to make them really pop out. By being selective with the sharpening, I kept the blurry areas nice and smooth (the sharpening affect would have made these more grainy). For the final touch, I put a vignette around the frame, darkening the edges slightly to bring more attention to the brighter center of the photo.

I like this photo a lot. How do you think I did? If there was one thing I wish I had done a little differently, it would have been to capture the photo at a little bit of an angle instead of being so 'straight down' on the flowers.