It Can't Rain All the Time

But if it did, I probably wouldn't mind.  I love the rain!  I love the smell of rain, the look of rain, and that's its generally cloudy and overcast when it rains.  I think me and Seattle would get along great because of rain!  Despite my love of it, rain and nice new shiny cameras don't really mix.  But I wasn't going to let that stop me from trying to snap a few good photos today.  

I'm trying hard to learn how to shoot in manual, as this is how I'm going to get the best photos.  My problem right now is that I'm overwhelmed with terminology and numbers I don't understand.  Each time I look up a new tutorial on what I want to do, I get more and more confused about how to work this camera!  I'm really starting to think taking a photography class is not a bad idea.  

So after much practice and many many adjustments to settings, here are the few photos I'm happy with today.  I still wish I was able to get some better shots of the actual rain, but that will come with time, practice, knowledge, and probably more equipment!

Standing inside our garage I snapped these pictures of a leaf on the driveway.  I was surprised to see such a pretty leaf so late in winter, especially since we don't have a single tree in our yard.  

This little guy blew a long ways to end up on our driveway and be right where I needed for a nice picture today!  It had stopped raining at this point, but the ground was still very wet, and the closeup brings out some beautiful colors in the wet concrete.

This picture is blurry I know, but it's because the focus was on the rain and not the trees in the background.  There's almost a bokeh affect in the background as well.  With more practice I'm going to figure out how to improve photos like this.  I know what I want to do, just not how to make the camera do it yet!

This is a picture of my daughter's purse left on the back porch.  She was not happy about it getting wet, but she was the one who left it outside!  I like the reflection it created on the wet concrete.

Here's a closeup of the arm of a chair on our back porch.  If you look closely you can see reflections in the rain about to drip off the arm.  

These last two photos are the closest I was able to get to capturing the actual rain.  It had picked back up a bit so you can see tiny splashes and the ripples made by the raindrops.

One other thing I want to point out on these photos is a free Photoshop action I used to sharpen and resize them for easy upload on the web.  Most of my photos will end up on here or on Facebook.  It'll be awhile before I'm doing prints or blowing any of them up for display.  

I was amazed at how much faster they uploaded while still being crisp clear photos!  You can check out the action for yourself here.