And then it started to rain…

Terminal Boy wrote:

Hen3ry wrote:

Pretty hot, lazy day, lounged around on the verandah and alternately read a book, chatted with passersby, and fiddled around with pictures and the internet.

Then the wet season downpour came. I was idly looking down at the flowers being beaten by the rain, admiring the colors with the sun shining through.

After a while, my somnolent brain started to wake up and I gallumphed inside for the camera. By the time I got it, sorted out a bored kids disagreement, and got out to he verandah again, the rain was tapering off.

Oh well, the rain might not be as spectacular as I would like, but I do like the pix:

The lines are the rain. The three vertical, heavier lines to the right of the flower above and the vertical line just above and to the right of the flower below, must be big drops falling down from the guttering. They are nearer the camera than the flowers and the other rain drops that are showing. Notice the drop hitting the flower above. Excellent!!!

GX7 + 100-300. I closed down the lens a bit for two reasons:

1. To get more rain into focus.
2. To give me a shutter speed that was slow enough for the rain drops to be visible as streaks but not so slow that they would be continuous lines.

The OIS probably would have allowed me to freehand at the speeds used, but I supported my arms on the verandah rail anyway.

Focusing was a bit problematical. The 100-300 didn't want to focus on the flowers. It would readily focus on a green leaf in much the same plane, and then focus on the flowers when I switched to them.

I had the camera set to Vivid mode and I actually had saturation in Vivid ramped up a bit as an experiment. In this situation with this red, it was too much; in PP, I had to lower the saturation. Along with tweaking the exposure just a touch, and cropping the top pic, that was all the PP I did.

The two times I tried to capture stationary flowers using the 100-300mm (GM5 and G7), I found the single central box AF struggled with the limited contrast across the blooms (using spot light metering as well) and othen selected the stalks/branches.

Pinpoint AF works fine in good light if everything's still, but it can hunt a little.

I found this to be one of those situations where AF+MF with the magnified window worked a treat.

I must admit that I have tried AF/MF and not mastered it, Terminal. I really should give it more of a go because it has obvious advantages over my work around of focusing on something else then shifting to focus on the actual subject. I have a notion the system prefers green over red.