Arty

This is very much not my normal style of shot - other people I follow do it, and do it well, but I've never really acquired the knack, so I tend to leave it alone. But out of a set of wet plant images I made today, R chose this and one other as his favourites, and I'm posting this one simply because it's a change from my usual stuff. R's other favourite, if you're interested, is here.

Being confined to barracks by the weather, I had one of those frustrating days when you tell yourself that you're going to get tons of backed-up stuff sorted out, and then you arrive at dinner time with a load of the backlog still staring at you reproachfully, and wonder what on earth you did with yourself all day. I certainly can't blame photography, because I only spent about fifteen minutes in the garden, looking for things that were photogenically wet - and then I didn't like most of the shots I took, so they went straight in the trash.

After dinner I did spend a little while fartnarkling in Lightroom with the few files I'd kept, to see if I could get them to please me more than they had to begin with. My processing is usually pretty conservative: check the histogram and white balance, do a tone curve, crop, sharpen and/or smooth as necessary, export. Partly for preference, and partly because of the subjects I tend to choose, I like my photos to be descriptive of the thing they represent, and I rarely go arty. But today I had a bit of a play with the new Profiles menu in Lightroom, and found that I quite like some of them - not least because all the ones that aren't simply Adobe or camera profiles come with a slider, allowing you to strengthen or weaken the effect to taste.

For this I used one of the Modern profiles, which applied a slight matte and smoothed the bokeh, and I think that helped me to warm to the image. Unlike some of the more extreme profiles though, it didn't change the colour balance of the file: this heuchera, called 'Marmalade', is a little symphony of russet, mustard, red, pink and white. If you can be bothered, it looks better full-screen.