Environmental Colors

The worse time to walk from the office to the sub shop is mid-day in the height of summer. Either the rain is beating down on you, or the sun is out and the heat is beating down on you. Either way, you come back wet with rain or sweat, but you come back wet. I suppose if I had my druthers I'd prefer the days without rain, except if rain is absent long enough we wind up with dry conditions and wildfires. We need the rain. And lots of it.

When the rains do come the vegetation (trees, grass, shrubs, flowering plants) thrive and turn vibrant colors. Grass and other green leafy plants seem to glow green. New growth can come out almost any color, such as these little oak sprouts (suckers) coming out of the base of this small oaks trunk.

Even the works of man can show subtle shades of color, especially when it's been broken down and mixed about. Consider this small section of debris on the site of the former arena where they're constantly demolishing it. Shattered concrete, metal, insulation, old brick pavers, and creeping grass mix about into an interesting industrial Rorschach test.

Technical

I'm still infatuated with the Leica 25mm on the Olympus E-PL2 body. That's a potent little handful. And yet, I've been pulling excellent results out of the E-P2 using the M.Zuiko 45mm lens.

I love what the 25mm can do when I slow down and coax it a bit. The bent tree trunk at top is sharp from front to edge and seems to hang in mid-air against the green background, as if it were cut out with an X-Acto knife. Where parts are sharp, they're very sharp. When elements get blurry, they get blurry quickly falling away from the plane of focus.

I really need to learn more about the capabilities of the camera, lens and Lightroom 4.1, and really build clarity in my photographs. I keep looking at Kirk Tuck and Ming Thein, just to name two, and seeing clarity in their work. That kind of clarity comes from something other than pixel-peeping, and I mean to master that particular technique.