Bright morn­ing after rain

I’m slow­ly work­ing my way to a major update/revision of my gal­leries (which, I apol­o­gize, have not been updat­ed in a long time), and part of that process is a ruth­less edit­ing-down of my col­lec­tion to best show­case my favourite images. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that some­times means leav­ing out ones that I real­ly like, and this image is an exam­ple of that. While it’s cur­rent­ly in my “Sum­mer 2007″ gallery, and I like it at least as well as some of the ones that “made the cut”, it just didn’t fit with the oth­er selec­tions. So, I decid­ed to post in the jour­nal here instead, where hope­ful­ly it can still be enjoyed all on it’s own.

I made this pho­to­graph between Rocky Moun­tain House and Nordegg, Alber­ta in ear­ly June 2007. It had rained heav­i­ly the night before, and the branch­es and lichens in this dense black spruce stand were drip­ping wet as the sun came up. Each drop acts like a tiny prism, catch­ing the light of the low sun. When the lens is de-focused as I did here, each spec­u­lar high­light becomes a glow­ing cir­cle of light, each with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent colour depend­ing on the angle. I know my blur­ry, out-of-focus work is not everyone’s cup of tea, but in this case I think it real­ly made for an inter­est­ing image (I’ve includ­ed a “straight” shot of the same stand below for interest’s sake), and it’s also a great exam­ple of how the optics in a lens can cre­ate effects “in the field” that are unat­tain­able using post-pro­cess­ing soft­ware (i.e. Pho­to­shop). I’d love to hear your reac­tions to this image, just click below…

Bright morn­ing after rain–in focus