After yesterday's PAD which was, let's face it, frankly shocking photographically and which would have hit the bit bucket had it not been for the related story, it was time to return the E-P1 to where it's happiest; lots of light and a low ISO.

The PAD for last year shows a lot of rain shots for early January. (Not the one for this day last year I grant you, but a lot of the earlier ones.) However it's been relatively dry for the start of 2012. There's been the odd exception like the storm that I captured last weekend but overall it's been fine weather with only the occasional dash of summer heat. Today, for instance, it would have been in the mid-20's so it was most comfortable. This shot gives an idea of the sort of day that it was.

I shot this pair with a view to doing a "Black and White" themed image. However when I applied a B&W adjustment layer I didn't like the outcome all that much. I toyed with the idea of leaving it as a full colour image but the verdancy of the trees would have overwhelmed the main subjects. Accordingly I adopted another approach; I dropped a hue/saturation adjustment layer on. I didn't mask the two cycles but I did limit the desaturation to the blue/green range to drop the vibrancy of the background without turning it into a selective colour image. (The affected range was from 241 degrees to 44 degrees, with 30 degrees of fall off on either end, for the curious.) This tended to pull the cycles out from the background and also left their indicators (which fall outside that colour range) more or less in tact.

Last Year