Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day if you didn't know. I hope everyone went out and at least hugged a tree, rode a bike, or something of those sorts. It was certainly a beautiful day in Bozeman (at least in the morning) and I managed to ride around town and get a quick run in before classes.

In honor of Earth Day, I really wanted to do something about nature. As it's now raining pretty hard out, what better thing to photography than the rain? Everything depends on water to survive, and I wanted to capture that beauty of water.

At first, I though about doing a water drop picture. I've never done one of those before, at least not outside in the dark, and the rain, and late at night, and by myself....so that didn't really work out so well. I ended up standing in the rain scratching my head of what to photograph as nothing I was trying was working.

I've often been in that place this year. Trying to come up with a new idea or at least a new variation of a new idea each day with out fail is pretty challenging. And then when you have an idea that you really want to do but can't figure out how to pull it off is really annoying and frustrating. I tried maybe 10 different ideas with varying degrees of success tonight, and even when I called it quits I wasn't sure if what I'd gotten would work.  The point is, even though something doesn't seem like it's even going to work and you've tried everything you can think of, keep trying. Most of the time something will just click and you can get the shot or figure out the problem. The rest of the time some freak accident will happen and magically the problem will solve itself.

Not the most inspiring words but I'm tired and literally misspelling every other word I'm tying and just want to get this done.

So, what did I do tonight?

Set a strobe to F@ck your eyes nuke the world power and pointed it straight up. With all the moisture in the air and falling rain, the light froze the rain drops amidst a glow a light. It looked pretty cool so I  took a few shots and then called it quits. I was shooting at ISO100, f2.8, and 1/200 to try to block out the ambient light on campus. The strobe was set to 1/2 power, so about 32 times brighter than what I normally shoot at.

This image was made in Lr. Out of the camera it looked like this.

It's pretty meh. White balance horrible. lots of noise. weird green flare. blurry. no contrast in the mids or shadows at all. Lameeeeeee.

also upside of how I want it.

So first thing I did was pump the clarity ALL the way up. Never have to much. This increases the midtone contrast a tone and brings out the drops of rain. Next I cropped this to an 8x10 size and cut off that weird flare. Then raised the contrast even more, and turned it black and white. Finally, I added blue to the shadows and green to the highlights. So there are really only two colors in the final image, and none were there in real life. Looks sweet though IMO.

Hate that JPEG compression though...so horrible. On Fb it's probably a lot better. I'll make sure it is so head over there to view it. Link to the page is on the right side of the screen....

So I suppose that's it! Sleep time! Yay!

See you tomorrow!