When the light's gone...

  Today it's been a pretty bad day when it comes to weather. Cold, I had to wear long johns. Wet and rainy, bad for the camera equipment. What ever, I felt I had to get out and just to motivate my self a little bit more I asked a friend to join me. When we started it was hardly raining, just a little bit of cold drizzle, but when we were almost there were I thought we would do a few images, it was already raining quite a bit. That's life and bad weather, even if it's raining cats and dogs, shouldn't be a hindrance for photography. There we were walking in the rainy forest with pretty bad light. So what can you do? Grab your speed light and use it. I didn't hope to find any animals but found. One poor Fire Salamander was crawling among the fallen leaves. Camera on the tripod and a little off-camera flash from the right side of the animal. It's almost like sun would be shining out side...

  
  Wet condition is good for fungi and I managed to make a couple of images of Puffball mushrooms. Again I chose to give the mushrooms some extra light therapy. In the first image the I used a longer shutter speed to give the backdrop some light. The second one has a shorter shutter speed and thus the background is a bit darker, this way you can see why these mushrooms are called Puffballs. The "smoke" coming out from the fungi is its spores, emitted because of an impact from a water droplet. Even if we witnessed this happening because of raindrops, in this image it is faked, my friend took some water from the nearby stream and you know...