A Wet Day Out

A very ordinary and wet day out in the mountains
But a great day to get out of town and smell the post-COVID roses, or something like that.
The Blue Mountains beckoned and didn't disappoint. It was cold, wet, cloudy and misty - nevertheless, it was terrific to be out of town and not be surrounded by masses of other people doing the same thing as us. Wet days do that. The freeway was quiet, with traffic at a minimum and even though this image was (more or less) the view we got from one of the mountain's most spectacular viewpoints, Lincoln Rock, it was still very atmospheric.

I recently received my annual notification that my Adobe CC account was due for renewal, ugh! But it got me thinking - do I really want to continue to pay $40 a month for Photoshop AND a bunch of other applications that I rarely, if ever use? As luck would have it, on the same day I noted that Affinity Photo, a so-called 'Photoshop killer' app produced by UK software people Serif, was on special for half its regular price (A$38). Worth a try I thought - even if I decided later it might not be as good as Adobe Photoshop. Here's the same shot (from the top of the page), opened in Affinity's 'HDR Persona' section - I really liked some of these included (HDR) presets - but of course, you can also record and save your own preset creations too. 

This HDR preset was called Loco Local and produced a cracking alternative to the real, wet, watery scenery seen in the unedited shot, top of page. Is the HDR function better than Photoshop's Merge to HDR? You betcha. Is it better than Aurora? I'm not sure yet - I need to use Affinity a while longer - but I think it's a close call.

One way to make your weedy wet weather attempts at making images look better than they really were on the day is to process the files using an HDR software application, even if it just one image file (typically HDR works best when you use a series of three or more exposure bracketed frames). In this case we used Aurora HDR Pro, currently our favourite HDR software.
(Pic by Natalie Hitchens)

Three-frame panorama of the soggy Blue Mountains.
HDR software can give your images a highly illustrative look
(Pic by Natalie Hitchens)

Another option when shooting in poor weather is to shoot close - use a MACRO lens, extension tube or even a MACRO filter (on the front of the lens), to achieve a real close-up look. By going close you remove the low contrast, and often uninteresting background of a wet day

Here's another close-up - taken in the pouring rain - with a 100mm MACRO lens. Because it was so wet - and my glasses kept steaming up - I decided to shoot a range of frames at different f-stops, ISO ratings and shutter speeds, hoping that at least a couple would be OK. As it happened I got a few successes - although I didn't know this till I got home.
Sometimes you just have to wing it...

And then there's the option of changing the context completely with a little help from some third-party objects pasted into the scene...

Blue Mountains from Robin Nichols on Vimeo.