Arty Grasses...

A sun-kissed country scene, on the Russian Steppe or the Norfolk Broads, perhaps...?

Well, not quite - how about a damp very early morning in Salisbury, under orange lamp-post lighting, in a big flower-pot, when I put a lens down to change it, I noticed these grasses swaying gently in the breeze.

I'd only put the lens down to take a rather nice tree and silhouette of a hotel against a whitish light, then someone decided to switch that light off. Putting that lens back on again, the landscaped "garden", even rockery is an overstatement, in front of one of those Govt. departments that no member of the public ever gets to go into and which of course, at just gone midnight, seemed to be security guardless.

This was about the fourth taken and after about six they just got worse. All were intentionally underexposed via the exposure compensation dial by - 1+2/3rds stop. Trying to use slow shutter speeds to get some movement failed miserably, nothing was sharp. To emphasise the very shallow depth of field of the 85mm f1.8 lens on DX format D7000 (127mm eqv) I added an amount of unsharp mask and altered the colour 'hue' to turn it less dark, browny orange to this gorgeous yellow. Fair amount of contrast/brightness fiddling and to be honest I'm not sure how the end result was reached.

The forecast for tomorrow is rain and rain and I'd gone out purposefully to beat it - it was already on its way - best bit of all is that this scene is about 200 yards from my flat and I can see it being a Blip subject again, when I don't want/can't go far.

This was about the last edited - they all had variations in their 'treatments' and so as to not waste them, I'll put them up as a small album on Facebook, in the morning.