Drops on the Web

DAY 144

24 MAY 09

I woke up in the morning and went outside to greet the day.

Nice fantasy -- that's just not the way I do things. I did wake up. I probably stumbled around a while. Eventually, I did go outside. Probably to take photos of my porch railing. I keep photographing it, thinking that one day I'll use it as my Project 365 shot. It hasn't happened so far, but I keep trying.

Anyway, a spider or other web-weaving creature had spun a web in the corner of my railing. It had rained the night before, and the threads of the web still held droplets of rain. Of course, I had to try and get photos.

I know it seems like I've been on a black & white kick lately. That's not necessarily true -- it's just the last few photos I posted looked better (in my opinion) in black and white. With this photo, the conversion cut out the distraction in the shot posed by the red brick.

Post-processing: noise reduction, sharpening, black & white conversion using the blue filter in Photoshop, border addition.

Upon Reflection...

DAY 28

28 JAN 09

Rain, rain, and more rain! In a drought-stricken area, all that water falling from the sky is exciting, even if the rain is sparse enough to avoid the drops by stepping to the right.

On Day 28, I came home from...somewhere...and went into the backyard. I had to enter the house through the back door since my dogs were in the garage (they're old and they don't like getting wet). Anyway, as I walked across the patio, I saw a couple of great puddles. My plan was to see if I could capture a raindrop hitting the puddle, the splash of explosion of water on water. But when I pointed the camera, what appeared in my viewfinder was much, much better.

I still got those raindrops, but even better, I got an amazing reflection. The images of some great naked wintertime trees stared back at me from the water's surface, and I knew I had my Project 365 shot.

Post-processing on this one was minimal, just my usual noise reduction, sharpening, and curves adjustment.

Droplets

DAY 26

26 JAN 09

I had two pictures for Day 26 I couldn't decide between. I asked my daughter pick one, and this is the one she chose. This is one of the leaves on the huge bush next to my front porch after a rain. We've been in a severe drought here for a number of years, so any kind of rain even is worthy of cheering. And when it rained on this day, I absolutely had to run out and take pictures.

I don't often use the macro setting on my little Canon point-n-shoot, so doing this photo gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment. And that's exactly why I was doing Project 365: to experiment and learn new things!

Post-processing included what has become my routine -- noise reduction and sharpening and a slight curves adjustment. Plus the addition of the border, of course.

Are you wondering which photo my daughter didn't choose? Here it is!