Raindrops in sunlight

click photo to enlarge
Recently overnight rain was followed by a sunny morning and the glistening foliage of the garden encouraged me to put my old 35mm 3.5 Four Thirds macro lens on its adapter and mount it on the camera. However, even as I walked around searching for a subject the warmth of the sun was visibly drying out the leaves. Consequently I headed for one of our our patches of Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis), a plant that I had been meaning to avoid.

Alchemilla is the obvious choice for any photographer wanting to capture raindrops on foliage. The minute hairs of the leaves cause rain to form into myriad drops of varying sizes. However, I'd taken photographs of the attractively shaped leaves on a number of occasions and I wanted to try a different plant. But the sun's effects elsewhere forced me back to the Alchemilla. So, rather than concentrating on the leaves I searched out the drops themselves. This photograph shows them clustered on the ends of a group of leaves that had yet to fully open. I liked it for the contrast of the dark, shady background against which I could place some drops. The only thing I don't like about the shot is that it has something of the look of a studio photograph taken with flash. I recognise that not everyone shares my antipathy to such things, but for those who do I can assure you that this was taken in natural light, in the garden solely with the aid of a tripod.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Raindrops on Lady's Mantle Leaves
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Manual
Focal Length: 35mm Macro (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:250
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The blame game and rain drops

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Am I cynical in thinking that our prime minister's exhortation to stop playing the "blame game" concerning the responsibility for, and handling of, the current flooding in England, is simply to prevent people examining the degree to which his government's policies are responsible for the extent of the flooding and the poverty of the response to it? Has he really forgotten that he was only recently blaming the flooding on the previous government's deficiencies. Moreover, I seem to recall him telling us, when he was first elected, that his would be a government that eschewed "Punch and Judy politics", that abandoned the usual name-calling and knock about; that he would usher in a new, responsible approach that raised the standard of political discourse. How soon all that was forgotten. How quickly did business as usual assert itself as U-turns, ministerial resignations, botched policies, missed targets and political embarrassments mounted. Unattributed briefings, back-biting, smears, statistical manipulation - the whole range of dark political arts - was deployed in double quick time, and very soon we were exactly where we have always been, with the public rating politicians among the lowest of the low, somewhere alongside journalists. Now, having said that he has no choice but to make deep cuts in public spending, exhorting us to tighten our belts and chopping services with a relish that borders on the fanatical, he suddenly announces "money is no object" in dealing with the flooding. Worse yet, instead of letting the responsible minister and the professionals who know how to deal with flooding get on with their jobs he announces that he is taking charge. I don't know whether to feel blessed that we are led by this Renaissance man or to despair that we (though not me!) have elected someone so prone to knee-jerk reactions, someone whose every action seems driven by whether or not it plays well in the media and to voters.

That despairing note was prompted by the confluence of the political news and the continuing rain, some of which I noticed on a window as the light started to fail. With my naked eye I could just make out colours in some of the drops on the glass. So, with the aim of revealing it, I mounted my 100mm macro lens on the camera and took this angled shot. I made sure the point of focus was off the left edge of the frame so that all the reflected highlights were out of focus to a greater or lesser degree. Recently I was speaking of how the camera often sees what the eye doesn't. That's especially true when you use a macro lens as some of the patterns in the highlights above show.

* The piece above was written on 11 February 2014
From The New Statesman, 12 February 2014: "After the session (Prime Minister's Questions) had ended, No. 10 briefed that there would be no new money made available and that any extra funding would come from contigency budgets, a clear reversal of Cameron's pledge yesterday."

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon 5DMk2
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm Macro
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Rainy days

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There are a number of reasons why I moved to eastern England. One of them is to experience the drier weather. I was born and raised in north-west England, a part of the country known for its regular and relatively high rainfall. I lived in Hull for a number of years and experienced there something of the drier weather that side of the country offers. But then I moved back to west Lancashire for about twenty years, once again subjecting myself to the wetness of the west. Now, however, living in Lincolnshire, I find that my love of the great outdoors is more easily sated and need not incur the drenchings that accompanied more than a few forays in the west. Moreover, I can usually plan to do something outdoors without needing to calculate whether or not it will be rained off - because it usually isn't.

Consequently, the recent days, most of which seem to have included a spell of rain at some point or another, have been something of a let-down. I've come to expect better! Or at least, different. It even poured down for much of our regular monthly trip north, over the Humber Bridge, into Yorkshire. So, with the expectation that I couldn't insert any photography based detours into our itinerary, we decided to do the weekly shopping a little earlier than was required, thereby making the most of the day that way instead. Today's photograph was taken after we'd parked in the supermarket car park, just before we scurried into the dry in search of groceries. The darkness of the afternoon, the rain-spattered windscreen,the glistening cars and tarmac, and the early lights necessitated by the murk of the day, offered one of only three photographs I took on the whole outing. Not my greatest shot, but not without some interest I think.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 15.3mm (41mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec
ISO:800
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Lady's Mantle

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Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) is one of those plants that, once you have it, you need never be without it. It readily spreads from the original clump and is soon spotted, spreading itself around the garden. But it's also one of those plants that people either strongly like or equally strongly dislike. Those who have an aversion to it see only a low growing, leafy, green plant with relatively unspectacular, weed-like, yellow flowers, a perennial that multiplies where it isn't wanted and which becomes somewhat straggly at the end of the season. However, people who favour it admire the palmate shape of the leaves that were once thought to resemble the scalloped mantle once worn around the neck and over the shoulders of women (the Lady is the Virgin Mary). They also appreciate the effective ground cover that it provides and its hardiness. But lovers of the plant most especially like the way that multiple water droplets, looking like liquid mercury, bead on the leaves after rain or a heavy dew.

This latter characteristic happens because of the small, soft hairs that cover the leaves. These beautiful drops of water caught the eye of the medieval alchemists (hence the Latin name) who, it is reputed, judged it the purest form of water and employed it in their attempts to turn base metal into gold. The plant in today's photograph has frequently been dotted with these jewel-like spots of water due to the frequency of rain in Britain this spring and summer. I took my hand-held shot after a particularly heavy downpour, just as the sky brightened for a short period before the onset of the next deluge.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Raindrops on the window

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It has rained at some point on most days for the past three months. You might be wondering what's so unusual about that - after all it is the British Isles. But the fact is, the eastern side of England is relatively dry. Spring is often so, and summer too. Consequently I expect to be able to go about my business without wondering what to wear on my body and feet. This year, thus far, that hasn't proved possible. Most of the rain has been steady, regular and not too heavy, but in sufficent quantity for the water companies to lift the drought restrictions that resulted from particularly low rainfall over the past couple of years. Yesterday, however, we had torrential summer downpours accompanied by crashing thunder and jagged lightning. The rain couldn't easily penetrate the saturated ground and formed large puddles and pools on the roads and on the gravel of my drive.

As it happens I'd been waiting for a heavy downpour accompanied by wind because we'd recently cleaned our windows and wiped them over with a liquid that is part detergent, part anti-static agent. I believe it used to be advertised as incorporating "nano-technology"! The advantage of this addition to the traditional clean is that water beads and runs off the glass very readily, grime doesn't build up as easily, and window-cleaning can be infrequent without any detriment to the clarity of the glass. A further advantage is that it causes the raindrops to collect in a very photogenic way, and I'm not one to pass up a photographic subject with those qualities.

So, as the rain lashed down you could find me with the macro lens on my camera, examining the raindrops on the windows from inside each room, looking for good collections to photograph. Here are the best two. The varying sizes of the water drops gives the shots a three dimensional character. They remind me of an asteroid belt comprised of shards and blobs of glass.

photographs and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Wet café chairs, apps and art filters

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I don't watch many of the TV programmes that people who know me expect me to see. The reason is that I'm prepared to devote only a very limited time to television. So, by the time I've watched, over the course of week, a couple of films, a couple of old, made-for-TV comedy shows, and one or two other programmes, I'm done. With that amount of viewing I've used up the time I'm willing to give to television, and good or bad, I won't watch more. To do so would deprive me of the time I want to give to my other interests and pursuits.

For the same reason I'm currently unwilling to join the majority of the population of Britain in owning a smartphone. It's not that I'm a Luddite, or that I don't think they have some uses above those offered by a traditional mobile phone: they do (though fewer than many would have us believe). The fact is I spend quite a chunk of my week at a computer screen and extending this further via the tiny display of a smart phone would - you've got it - "deprive me of the time I want to give to my other interests and pursuits". However, I'm enough of a realist to accept that the way mobile communications are going the day may come when I will need (rather than want) one.

There is one thing about smart phones that I do rather like, and that is the greater capabilities of the built-in cameras. They are not yet as good as even a basic compact camera, but for some purposes they are good enough. Moreover, currently appearing on the market is the Nokia Pureview 808 with a 41 megapixel camera outputting 2/3, 5 and 8 megapixel images, incorporating a useful zoom facility, offering the opportunity to achieve bokeh, and the capacity to record HD 1080p video. These are the sort of specifications that enthusiast photographers will find appealing. The images that I've seen look very good indeed.

Of course, there is a downside to smartphone cameras and that lies in the "apps", especially the "Instagram" variety that offer "effects" that people find irresistible. I came across this article on PetaPixel recently - "Iconic Photos "re-taken with Instagram" - and concluded that such effects, by and large, represent a pretty good method of ruining a shot whilst at the same instantly consigning it to a big subset of other smartphone shots. All of which brings me to my wet café chairs. After converting from colour to black and white I applied digital versions of traditional processing effects - increasing contrast, burning and dodging. In other words it was hand-crafted, insofar as that is possible with a computer! So why do I think it looks like a commercial pin-hole or Holga effect? It seems that digital camera "art filters" and smartphone "apps" that include both these options are starting to impinge on our consciousness and affect how we see photographs.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 99mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Eyes, mind and camera

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Displayed on a chest of drawers in our house is a beige, glazed, clay model of an animal. It has big ears, a wide mouth and, on each side of its body, green, feathered wings. Its tail is broad, notched, and may be either feathers or hair. The general posture, if I can call it that, resembles the way a dog sits with its front legs straight and the rear legs folded under. Except that those back legs are bent the wrong way and look more like a person's would if they were kneeling. The mythical beast, which has elements of the griffin and Pegasus about it, is a treasured possession that was made by my youngest son when he was young. He must have used his memory when he modelled the back legs of the animal, because if he'd followed an actual precedent, as he did for the rest of the animal, he'd have got them right.

Our eyes and mind often deceive us in this way. We look at something and create an internal picture that is at variance with reality. Sometimes that is because we mis-interpret the subject, but other times it's because we can't clearly see the phenomenon in question. A classic example of the latter relates to the eighteenth century and earlier paintings and drawings of running horses, with their front legs stretched forwards and their back legs stretched rearwards. It was only when the English-born photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, in the nineteenth century, ran a series of sequentially taken still photographs rapidly one after the other, that the truth of the horse's gallop became clear.

I was reminded of this when I leaned out of a bedroom window to take some photographs of rain falling on our water lily pond below. When I varied the shutter speed of the camera I recorded different versions of the effect of the drops hitting the surface of the water. None of them precisely matched what I thought I was seeing with my own eyes. The shot that I've posted today is quite close but the camera saw the shadows of the ripples on the surface of the pond much darker and in greater numbers than they appeared to me. However, it's an effect that I like, and it adds a semi-abstract, unifying layer over the young leaves and dead strands of vegetation. I frequently take photographs of this pond in spring when the lily leaves unfurl below the water, and in autumn when they die back from whence they came. Why this time of year should appeal to me more than summer when the multiple showy flowers are in full bloom I leave you to work out.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Looking and seeing No. 2

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Today's photograph could be many things. It could show blocks of ice on a frozen planet captured by a passing spacecraft's camera. It might show shards of a broken material - say, amber, plastic or safety glass. Or it could be a close-up image, taken through a microscope, of tiny debris littering a surface that, to the naked eye, looks clean. In fact, as the photograph's title reveals, it shows raindrops clinging to the vertical surface of a door - my garage door to be precise.

A while ago, around breakfast time, I went into the garage to get something, and when, mission accomplished, I opened the door and stepped out, the low, slanting light of the sun caught the raindrops causing them to glisten and throw shadows across the painted surface. This immediately caught my eye and I went for the LX3 to get a shot of the subject. As I set the camera to macro and framed a section of the door I reflected that the resulting image wasn't as interesting as it first appeared; but I pressed the shutter nonetheless.

However, when I brought the image up on my computer screen the photograph looked more interesting than I imagined. Not because it's a shot with great composition, colour, etc, but because I was very surprised by the shape of the raindrops. I didn't expect them to be all the same, nor did I expect them to be regularly shaped - I've shot enough raindrops to know that they vary in those respects. What surprised me was the smooth angularity of so many of them. They looked more like fragments of a solid material than liquid water. The temperature was around 10 Celsius, so there was no question of them being on the verge of freezing. What I conclude from this image is that, as far as raindrops go, I've been guilty of looking and not seeing, and that my camera, once again, has opened my eyes to the truth about a small part of our world.

Why "Looking and seeing No. 2"? Because I've used the title once before, here.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Heucheras

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How do you choose the plants that you have in your garden? Like most people I select plants on two main criteria - usefulness and beauty. Let's take usefulness first. That's a quality that applies to everything that goes into the vegetable garden because here the plants are either edible or they provide flavour (herbs). But usefulness extends beyond food plants. A large flowering cherry provides us with welcome shade in summer, offers food to the blackbirds at the same time, and is a good place for a nestbox and bird feeders. It also, of course, offers beauty all year round, but especially when it is in blossom. Other useful plants are the trees and shrubs that screen areas, or mark boundaries, or act as wind-breaks,. or give fruit.

Decorative plants - flowering annuals and perennials, foliage plants, etc are chosen mainly for the beauty that they bring to the garden. Some have an extra quality being suitable for cutting and displaying indoors in vases, but in the main they earn their position by how they look.

However, there is one further criterion that influences the plants I choose for the garden (and to have in the house), namely is it a good subject for photography! Flowers that grow from bulbs are often large, distinctive and photogenic, consequently bluebells, tulips, narcissi, etc proliferate in our borders. Climbing plants and trees that have blossom are also good subjects for the camera, and they too are found in numbers. But plants with distinctive leaves such as New Zealand flax, hostas, begonias, and many perennials also offer something worth photographing.

We're currently doing some work in one area of the garden that is overhung by trees, and it's likely that more heucheras will be planted here. These evergreen plants with leaves of varying colours and upright, delicate flowers are quite tolerant of shade. We currently have a few in a different location that is also under trees, and they are proving their worth, offering something for the eye (and camera) right through the year, so it seems a good idea to use them elsewhere. Today's photograph shows one of them, a dark leaved variety, after rain, the gloss on its leaves adding to the shine of the water droplets.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Why black and white photography?

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There are many people who question why photo- graphers still work in black and white. "We see the world in colour," they say, "and every camera produces colour images, so why convert them to black and white?" The act of making a black and white image, to those who think this way, is deliberately restricting and reductive; a process that produces less than is possible. It's a perfectly legitimate and serious question, and one that requires more space than my blog pieces to answer fully, but here are a few of my thoughts on the subject.

Early photography was monochrome and its practitioners produced great work, some of which easily stands comparison with that of later years. The ability to make images of great quality in black and white is the only justification that is necessary for its continued use. After the advent of colour, black and white photography began its downward slide, but has never completely gone away. Why is that? Well, many people never saw its "restrictions" as limiting their creativity any more than poets felt restricted by the sonnet form, musicians the rondo, or fine artists, the ink wash: it simply defined the compass of one aspect of the many elements of photography (colour), and allowed the photographer to do anything within that circumscribed area. So black and white photographers composed giving greater weight to tones, shadows, highlights, contrast and line. Subjects that didn't work in colour, due to the combinations within a composition, could be made to work in black and white. Coloured filters could change the balance of tones across an image - a blue summer sky could be made to appear any shade between light grey and black. Photographs of landscapes under the flat light of an overcast sky could be made to work better in black and white than in colour. Depending on the subject black and white (and shades of grey) could be used to give a unique emotional value to a shot. Furthermore, the polar opposites of black and white enabled the making of images of stronger contrast and greater imapct than is usually possible with colour. In our colourful digital age we can still do all of this - so why shouldn't we?

Today's photograph shows rain drops on the fresh, newly opened, dark, glossy brown leaves of a rose bush in my garden. As I wandered round looking for images after the rain had stopped, the deep colour and highlights attracted my attention. The sky was still heavily overcast, but the sheen of these leaves really stood out. I took the shot, hand-held, predicting that the high contrast would translate into black and white very well, and would emphasise the detail of the leaf veins and water drops better than a colour photograph. And so it proved.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125 seconds
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Milk, choice and cars

click photo to enlarge
"Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants, so long as it's black"
said of the Model T by Henry Ford (1863-1947), U.S. industrialist

A supermarket that I shop at sells various kinds of milk. Nothing wrong with that you might think; some prefer full cream and others skimmed. However, it's not that choice that puzzles me, rather it's the choice between two different kinds of semi-skimmed milk in cartons holding the same quantity. What's the difference between them? Well, one is quite a bit cheaper than the other. Now I'm used to being presented with choice in foodstuffs where the quality (and hence, price) is measurably different, but how does that work with milk? The sell-by dates are no different, the colour is the same, and both (presumably) conform to the quantity of fat that should be in this kind of milk. I've puzzled over this one for a while. Are the cows that produce the more expensive milk "a cut above", refined, aloof even, the sort that wouldn't say moo to a goose? Do they feed on only the sweetest grass and hand-picked fodder? Or is it just a crazy extension of the idea of choice into an area where it's plainly ridiculous? Is it a way of getting a few pence more from the pretentious who like to think that their cuppa is laced with milk that's a touch superior to that of the proles?

I think I'm one of many people who has got fed up with being offered too much choice. Do I really want to waste my life agonising over 30 different DSLRs that all take perfectly good photographs? Or compare the merits of one lemonade with the eight other offerings on the shelf? And don't get me started on potato crisps (chips): why do we need a complete aisle devoted to the many incarnations of this fat-laden snack? There are times when I think Henry Ford had it right - one colour for cars would suit me. In fact I've only ever owned red, blue and silver cars. These happen to be the commonest colors in the past few decades, and I read that silver outsells all others by a big margin at the moment. Just how much would we be missing if you could have any colour you wanted so long as it was silver? All your transport needs would still be met. But, I suppose the posing needs of some wouldn't be!

Today's photograph shows the residue of a rain shower on the metallic silver of my car - a colour that I alighted on quite incidentally because it was the only model the dealer had in stock. It looks like a particularly grainy image in need of noise suppression, but the dots are just the flecks in the paint that produce the metallic look.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/125 seconds
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Looking into the familiar

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"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English Romantic poet

Shelley's perceptive remark about the power of poetry to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary might also be applied to photography. If, in place of the analytic and expressive powers of the poet, we substitute the observational and representational powers of the photographer, we see that photography too can show us beauty and interest in that which is frequently overlooked.

The other day I was visiting a gallery, looking at examples of modern design, and reading about the sources of inspiration that prompted the forms the designers had applied to furniture, jewellery, ceramics, etc. After I had reflected on what I saw I went outside to find that a shower had fallen whilst I was indoors. Some metal tables that, in better weather, are used by people to eat outside the gallery cafe were covered in drops of rain. Perhaps I was inspired by the example of the designers whose work I had been studying; maybe the shiny highlights simply caught my eye; or it could have been the yellow picked up from the nearby wall (making the rain look like liquid gold) that was the attraction. Whatever the reason, I was drawn to the texture and patterns that the rain produced on the tables, and I took a number of photographs from different angles. I've seen wet tables before, but on this day I looked more closely and saw interest and beauty in them: the familiar became something extraordinary.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On