Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. ~ Langston Hughes, American poet
The garden glistened this morning with a thousand silver liquid drops of rain, lingering from yesterday’s storms. I’ve been absent of late, preoccupied with finishing a large music piece due in July and with testing and refining my video techniques for the Penn’s Woods project.
This morning, I gave myself a ramble about the garden to capture the sudden wealth of beautiful scenes of raindrops on leaf and bloom. I have been trying to develop a cinematic approach in capturing video, using selective focus (depth of field) and composing images using a spiral Fibonacci curve. Today, I challenged myself to shoot still photos the same way, using one lens (60 mm macro) and publishing only those photos that needed no cropping and minimal technical prep. Here are a few images of the garden in a magical moment and hopefully a reflection of my current goals in capturing images. Click on any photo to trigger the gallery view. Enjoy! (All photos ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse, All Rights Reserved)
Kiss me with rain in your eyelashes,
come on, let us sway together,
under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
~Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet
composerinthegarden 
Just magical, Lynn. I love a garden after the rain…
Thanks, Elizabeth – it is one of my favorite moments too.
Beautiful images, Lynn. Viewing them brought me a great sense of peace. 🙂
On another note, I’m happy to report I can now access your blog without jumping through hoops. My satellite internet connection needed upgrading. All is well now. Still slow, but I’ll take what I can get.
Thanks, Robin; delighted to hear that you enjoyed them. Slow internet would be a real downer for me; certainly a lesson in patience!
Simply gorgeous shots!
Thank you, Paula!
Beautiful set of pictures! I remember being into drop shots too when we were on holiday in Austria. For days we only had rain and rain that instead of feeling so sorry that our holiday was getting spoiled, I found myself amazed that rain presents beauty in its own way and in its own terms. 😉
Thank you, Malou, and you are so right! Rain does present its own beauty – sounds like you “saved” your vacation with that discovery 🙂
A beautiful set – the rain drops perched perilously on a leaf – defying gravity are sublime.
Thank you for your kind comment, Andy – I became entranced with those raindrops 🙂
Superb pictures with the rain droplets! and love the rain poems – it’s a rainy day here, just perfect to enjoy your post! Good luck with the project.
Thank you, diversifolius – sometimes rainy days are made for poetry 🙂
These speak about nourishment. I love the pale pink roses & the smoke bush leaves, and the photo at the odd angle looking from under the dogwood is great. Interesting to read about the technical side in the comments. Thank you for sharing your garden’s delights. Ahhh..
Thank you, bluebrightly; glad you enjoyed the photos. The dogwood photo is one of my favorites; walking under that cloud of white blooms is a daily delight.
I love the subjects you chose to photograph. The raindrops and the technical quality made them truly special.
Charlie, thank you such kind words – glad you enjoyed the photos! Everything here is just outside my back door; I love having a garden to photograph at any time of day.
Lovely pictures of raindrops on flowers. You can see little reflections of light in some of them.
Thanks Chris! The ones against dark leaves have the most reflection; I think that is why I was drawn to those especially.
I must admit I don’t get too poetic about raindrops falling on MY head! I am deeply envious of those shots – I always seem to need lots of cropping and adjustment.
Any chance of a preview – er, pre-hear – of a section of your current music?
Ooh, I was SO close to using that song! The shots are really coming from the discipline of shooting video, which doesn’t allow for cropping. So, I’m training my eye to compose in the frame, not unlike shooting slides from years ago. I’ve also been paying attention to the look of the photo in Live View (NIkon) so that I can adjust exposure to dark and light subjects on the fly. Once again, essential when shooting video. It is an interesting experience to shoot for one medium and have it transfer to another and compare the results.
As far as a pre-hear, yes, the next post will be about my spring peeper excursion, i.e. frog songs from our local watersheds. And perhaps a little music too 🙂
I should do more video to get the habit.
Good! Thank you for the music in advance. (Don’t go Abba on me, though!)
Love your fragile delicate photo shots.
Thank you, Jean.
Great catches with the droplets! Good luck finalizing the project.
Thanks, Frank – I’m deep in “composing land” these days, with occasional garden breaks.
I appreciate you “like” of my photo so came to see what you do here. I am impressed with your creative work–music and photos– and one assumes gardening, as well! Since I was raised among musicians (was one once) and live with one, love flowers and nature, and am fascinated by others’ creative pursuits I am now following your blog. Thanks for a lovely time spent here tonight! I hope you will stop by again–I also write prose and poetry. Regards and blessings.
Everything looks so fresh and clean. We’re baking out here! Your photographs are absolutely beautiful. I particularly like the peek through the dogwood. 🙂
Thank you, Ogee. We’ve had lots of rain this year but separated by days of heat and sun, so the garden growth is very luxurious (including the weeds!) I finished a series of video shots of the dogwoods similar to this shot and thought I would try some stills; glad you liked it!
Refreshingly beautiful.
Composing in the camera is a form of meditation, I do believe. You made capturering the rain in the garden look easy.
Thank you Carol, a wonderful compliment! Pulling off doing something difficult and making it look easy feels like a success to me 🙂
Very nice images, Lynn. Macro shots of flowers and foliage often sing after a rain and these are no exception.
Thanks for such kind comments, Kerry. I haven’t used the macro lens much but it seemed to be the best choice in this situation.
Just for fun, you might want to try getting *really* close with your macro lens and see what kinds of details are revealed at something approaching the minimum focusing distance of the lens. It’s an entirely different world.
Kerry, you can see the result of not cropping the images and the limitations of this Nikon “micro” lens. Most of these photos are within the 10″ limit of focus. It doesn’t have a great magnification rate, barely macro in my opinion, and I am considering selling it and getting the 105 micro lens, more modern and easier to use, yet heavier, bigger, and one more expense. This exercise was to explore the limitations of this lens and whether I wanted to keep it or not; the results quickly became obvious to me. I originally bought it to use with my D80 crop sensor camera, which would have made it an 80mm macro. With the D600, I actually get better closeups with the 70-200 shooting from further away, as I found with my video shoots ,but I thought I would explore what is possible before I made a decision. I think to get really close, I would have to use extension tubes, and that just is not my style of shooting. So, I’m still considering my options. Any suggestions would be welcome!
Glorious, Lynn; I think the photos are some of your best: I could smell the rain and felt the shady peace. Thank you so much for all the time you put into this post. I hope it offered a lovely respite from your other creative work. (And testing. And grading.) 🙂 It certainly blessed my harried day!
Thanks, Kitty; it was a lovely respite for me and I’m delighted that it offered some joy to your day 🙂