Wet

It has been unusually wet around here lately. Long spells of steady rain supplemented by truly torrential downpours have raised the water table so high that rivulets of water are springing from grassy banks, and drains that have been blocked with fallen leaves are creating lake-like puddles that in some spots have flooded right across the road. I went for a walk the other afternoon and was curious to see clear water running down across the main pavement and into the road from some houses up a small side-path. At first, I thought it must be a burst water main or that someone had left a hose running, but it turned out to be a streamlet that was gushing out of the boundary bank of the adjacent and steeply sloping graveyard. Hmm, I don't like to think of the ways that water might be, um, infused.

I ended up in the municipal Sports Ground, which – sitting as it does on clayey soil in a steep-sided valley – has become in large part a quagmire. Well-beaten paths through the grassy areas have become shallow water-filled ditches, and the very steep tarmacked path down one side of the valley was awash with shallow but fast-running water that would easily overtop ordinary shoes. However, the late-afternoon sun came out to illuminate everything briefly before darkness began to fall, and with the phone I managed to get some decent photos.

Incidentally, I have mentioned my use of the Halide app for the iPhone a number of times as a good way of getting usable "raw" DNG files. Annoyingly, that app malfunctioned on my phone a couple of weeks ago, so I downloaded the ProCamera app as a temporary substitute. Although Halide was quickly sorted out by a (much postponed) upgrade to iOS, I have now become a fan of ProCamera, which also delivers good raw DNG files. Why? Because, for me, it has one particular killer feature: basically, the focus point is represented on the screen as a blue square, and the metering point is represented by a yellow circle. Both can be moved around on the touchscreen independently, giving the most intuitive way of getting a properly focussed, properly metered image I've ever come across, especially compared to using the clumsy AE/AF button on a regular camera. Do any actual cameras with a touchscreen have this feature, implemented in this particular way? If not, it's so simple and yet so effective that they should do. So FWIW I recommend ProCamera, especially if, like me, you usually meter off the brighter areas (often the sky if there are good clouds), and sort out the darker areas "in post". The exposure latitude to do this, of course, is why we like raw files, even if the ones from a phone are a bit "noisy" in low light. Half the fun is rising to the challenge!