watercolour

The weather has been mostly grey recently and I’ve barely bothered to take my camera out with me as I haven’t expected to find much to take pictures of. Today, though, I decided to go out in the drizzle and within five minutes of leaving the house I came across a tree in full blossom.

Naturally, I decided to take pictures, but when I looked at them later on the computer I was disappointed to find that they might as well have been in black and white.

I’ll admit that the flowers weren’t dazzlingly bright, but they were not quite as grey as the picture suggests, so I’ve been fiddling around trying to find a way to make them a little more cheerful.

The software allows all sorts of adjustments to light levels, colours, tones, focus, curves, contrast and exposure. It has filters galore and you can use all manner of techniques to stylise your photos. There’s even a spell check option – which I didn’t feel the need to use.

Eventually I clicked on “vibrance”, thinking perhaps I’d be able to shake some of those raindrops away, and it led me to another choice, which was “saturation”. I was fairly sure those poor flowers were quite wet enough but by increasing the saturation I seem to have got rather closer to the colour I actually saw.

True, the sky in the photo is now white, but it isn’t as if it was a particularly nice colour before.

I suppose some readers would rather have poetry than photography, so here’s a re-post of some light verse that seems suitably on-topic.

English Weather

There’s a tap been left dripping in Heaven
by an angel who washed out his socks;
he washed and he rinsed and he wrung them
unaware that the sink always blocks.

Now he’s finished, and gone on his business
of singing and learning to play
on a harp that is golden as sunshine.
Down on Earth life’s decidedly grey.

The tap has been dripping and dripping,
the water’s come over the brim;
Mankind is developing webbing
and gills, and has started to swim.

What they need up in Heaven is a plumber
who would fix pipes and taps at one go,
who would change all those worn out old washers,
stop them leaking on us down below.

Here on Earth we’re preparing more sandbags,
not sure that the tide has yet turned;
can it be that the Lord’s not omnipotent
where getting a plumber’s concerned?