Spring!

[liv]

The sun has finally come back, and everything is blooming enthusiastically, and I've been getting over-excited about the macro button on my camera.

Had fun in the garden of my parents' house at the end of Passover, which was the first week in April. Daffodils and trees in blossom and lots of other things which I expect Mum and Granny know the names of but I have no idea.

Here's a few from my garden yesterday.

And some more from the surrounding area, particularly the giant cemetery which lies just behind my house. There's an odd one out which is of masonry rather than spring foliage, but hey, I like it anyway.

Does anyone have any good tips for dealing with ultra-white flowers which tend to saturate my camera's sensors? Sensible settings for taking the photograph, ways for rebalancing in Photoshop (my usual fiddling with the Levels menu isn't quite cutting it, and I suspect that I'm looking for information that the camera never recorded in the first place due to being overwhelmed by too much reflected white light). Some of these have come out ok, but quite a few I had to throw away because they were just glaring white patches with no detail.

Secondly, I have a bunch of new plants in my garden. (Exciting!) Some of them I put there by planting seeds and bulbs, some of them I think the previous owner put there (I have found remnants of little plastic tags), and some of them are weeds. But I don't know enough about gardening to be able to tell which are which! Yesterday I went around and pulled up everything that looked like dandelions, everything that looked like goosegrass, and everything that looked like sycamore seedlings. But I'm left with this lot, and I don't know which ones are desirable and which are weeds.

If you're good at that sort of thing (Mum?), can you take a look at my photos and tell me which of these I should destroy and which I should keep and hope that they turn into something pretty? A I think is a geranium; it smells like it, and there's only one of it, about 25 cm tall. B is about 15 cm tall, there's a few of it but only in one bed. C is absolutely all over one of my beds and nowhere else, so I think it's something I planted earlier in the year. The tallest ones are getting on for 40 cm, and it's growing fast. You can see in some of the other panes that it has red-streaked leaves when it first comes up, and they later darken to green. D there's only one of, maybe 20 cm tall. No idea. E I think is most likely to be a weed, as there's some of it in the cracks in the pavings as well as in the flower beds. 10 cm tall, with more rounded leaves than the plant I've called B.

There are also some teeny-tiny things, which you can see if you look at the background of some of the main pictures. I think they're probably weeds but I also think I should wait until they grow a bit to be able to identify them. (This may be a foolish decision!) Some grasses and some narrow leaf blades which I'm fairly sure are my bulbs coming up. And a few bits of bramble and rose suckers, which should probably go. Wow, I'm not sure someone this ignorant should be trusted with living things, not multicellular ones anyway!

Anyway, yay spring! I should leave the computer and soak up more sunshine while I have the chance.

Comments

[ewx]

I have Lightroom rather than Photoshop but both are Adobe products; in that the slider to use is “Recovery”, assuming of course there’s anything to recover.

You don’t say what sort of camera you have but the feature you want is usually called Exposure Compensation; it lets you adjust the exposure up or down by a stop or so compared to the automatic exposure system’s guesswork.

[liv]

Ta ever so, that's just the kind of advice I wanted. OK, I should play with Exposure Compensation rather than just overwhelming myself by trying to switch to entirely manual settings. (My camera is a Canon Powershot, which I'm getting on very well with; it has a lot of flexibility to go from point and click to full control with lots of options in between.)

[403]

Pretty sure I've seen B and C in flowerbeds around here, although the climate is sufficiently different that you might not want to rely on that.

Also, dandelions are a perfectly good salad green, so long as you know they haven't been sprayed with pesticides. All parts of the plant are edible, but some may taste bitter depending on the current stage of growth.

[liv]

Huh, I did not know that you could eat dandelions. Perhaps I should be less prejudiced towards them, then.

[403]

European settlers introduced dandelions to America in order to eat them. Most people here don't know it either.

[holyschist]

I just "underexpose" compared to the automatic setting. Your Powershot may have an "exposure priority" setting that will automatically handle aperture and let you manually fiddle with the exposure.

[nanaya]

Oh pretty!

From Serena

[(Anonymous)]

"Whiteout" on a Canon Powershot I can help with (I have an S50 which is fairly old, but I'm imagining the controls will be similar). Turn the dial on the top to P then press the function button. Then use the arrow keys (mine is top right) to go left down the scale; the brighter it is, the further you need to go. When you've taken the picture, look at the display. Any part of the image which has whited out will flash. If it does flash, go left a bit further and take the picture again. I tend to go a whole stop down to start with (the scale on mine is in quarters). You can then use Photoshop to lighten the photos again.

As for the photos, A looks as if it might be an aquilegia. D looks like an anemone. B I don’t recognise, but doesn’t look like a weed, so I would wait and see if it looks pretty when it flowers, then decide! C I recognise but can’t place, but probably isn’t a weed. E is harder, it could be a weed but might not be.