A Scenic World

I set out yesterday to explore a new bike path. I’d found it a couple of weeks ago, but due mainly to the weather I hadn’t revisited it until yesterday. You see, we’ve been plagued by rain these past weeks. And not just the daily 30-minute storms I’m used to from Florida. No, here it either rains all day or it rains for an hour, stops for an hour, rains for another two hours, stops for an hour….it’s been a trial just getting groceries without getting wet (I’m a biker/walker: no car here).

But yesterday the sun broke through the clouds and I was out the door in a flash. The trail ended up being spectacular: it started in a field with horses (with their babies!) and wound through a forest heavy with bright green undergrowth from the rain. It was uphill all the way, but I could just see a ridge to my right, and the path seemed to be meandering in that direction. So with my head down and my hands gripping the bar, I trudged along and finally, finally made it to the top.

The path broke through the trees into endless fields of wheat. I stopped and marvelled and kicked myself for not bringing a wide-angle lens with me. Then I realized that the sun had disappeared while I had sweated my way to the top. A wind had started – without pause, it shook the trees and the leaves and brought the smell of rain.

I turned around and immediately pushed my bike into a gear that would get me home quick. Thankfully it was all downhill on the way back. I pulled up to the door just as the big raindrops started falling. And me being me, I ran inside and grabbed my camera before I even took off my helmet.

I got a pretty good snap of this bright yellow flower in our yard, but I’ve already done a yellow flower with raindrops on it this summer (see: “Whispers of Spring”). I wanted this one to look different, so I decided to take it black-and-white.

While I was playing around with it, though, I noticed that I could achieve a silvery effect by leaving just a little bit of color saturated.

I’d pushed the contrast and the blacks and the clarity a great deal. Here’s the flower with those changes made to it, before I changed the white-balance:

I changed the white balance to bring out the drops more. This made the flower itself more yellow-green than orange-yellow:

From this step, I found that if I left just a little bit of yellow and green in there, the effect was mesmerizing (for me, at least). Strangely enough, if I changed the tones at all so that the flower was more orange, the effect was gone. If I desaturated it completely, I got this:

But if I made sure that the picture’s total saturation was normal and then adjusted the saturations of the individual colors so that the yellow and the green had just a tiny bit showing (around 5%), then I ended up with the silvery effect:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.