We’ve had a gorgeously dry and hot July in the UK, but here in the Lake District at least the weather broke at the weekend and we had much needed rain. While dry, sunny weather is fabulous for doing wildlife photography particularly of moving animals, birds and insects because we can use a fairly low ISO which vastly reduces noise in our images while retaining a high enough shutter speed to capture motion, it is less good for things like flower photography.

Photographing flowers outdoors in bright sunshine can cause blown out highlights which lack detail and starkly contrasting lights and darks which then need work to correct in editing. Taking pictures of the same flowers on a still but overcast day, however, removes these issues.

I’ve recently planted native Purple Loosestrife next to my new pond as it is, apparently, good for resting Dragonflies. It’s over a metre tall and contains multiple branches of pretty mauve pink flowers but not one particular focal point. I wanted to use it to make a photograph, so nipped out in the drizzle and, holding a cream peace of cardboard behind which gave a nice, uncluttered background and a remote shutter release, took a quick picture. I then cut off a stem and took a picture of it on a light box indoors, but then didn’t quite know what to do with either image.

As a straight forward record shot the flower on its own is rather uninteresting, so I decided to do something more creative……..but what? 🤔 As it was planted to attract Dragonflies I decided it would be nice to incorporate one in the picture, deciding on this Damselfly taken a couple of years ago on the Solway Coast as it was nicely sharp and on a plain background which would make it fairly easy to cut out in Photoshop.

I then hunted for a suitable texture from my bank of texture photographs, which would give a painterly effect without overpowering the main subjects of the picture and settled on this one. The opacity was reduced and the vivid red colour was removed in Photoshop (hue/sat adjustment layer, clipped to the texture, red channel selected and saturation reduced).

These 3 images were loaded into Photoshop, edited both individually and as a whole, and this was the end result. A couple of hours work on a rainy afternoon 😊