And now for something completely different...

This morning two of us went to book and pay for the flights for an overseas sojourn that four of us are going on later this year. After performing CPR on my wallet I returned home, just as an intense thunder and lightning storm came through.

Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening. To some.

To me it was the thought that I might get some interesting results from shooting the heavy raindrops hitting the pool. At first I thought of trying to get a smoothed out appearance by shooting very, very slowly.

No, don't think that's working. Then I switched to a faster capture using the 12-40 lens. And that looked a bit more interesting, but it wasn't detailed enough. So off came the 12-40, and on went the 40-150.

Thankfully this was a long thunderstorm.

Finally I got something that I liked, though I've had to crop it pretty severely. Not that this matters as the DOF was shallow anyway; I'd had to open all the way up to get enough speed to freeze the motion.

And here it is; one drop that I think is bouncing back off the surface and is almost balanced on a column of water, and one that has punctured the surface and pushed straight through it.

Some sharpening and contrast boosting was done through a levels adjustment and the colour was adjusted to shift it to a deeper blue, but there was no modification of shape and texture; that was all just nature at work, albeit on a scale that we seldom consciously see.