It’s been raining cats and dogs around Central Florida lately!  And my cats are not particularly happy about it.  They are not fans of lightning and thunder, and even the gentle rains often leave the porch too wet for feline usage.

But on the bright side, there’s a decent chance of catching a rainbow after work on hot summer afternoons.  This one was pretty over my backyard at the end of May.  I drove off to a grassy area near the house, hoping to get a better foreground for my image.  Alas, by the time I got out to the right spot, the rainbow had disappeared.

My rain lilies have been blooming a lot, too!  Rain lilies only bloom after it has rained.  Mine were tag-along transplants from my parents’ yard when I took their purple Crape Myrtle a few years back.  They have since been flourishing in my backyard.  I love the mass of pink flowers around the base of the crape myrtle.  Rich doesn’t mind these flowers, either, since they surround one of his turtle statues!

Rain lilies look like they should be fun to photograph, but they are actually a bit challenging.  When I’ve tried to do close-up shots of the insides of the flower, I haven’t really liked the results.  The pale pink flowers are gorgeous in person, but they appear washed-out and pale in my photos.  My camera also seems to have trouble focusing on these flowers for close-ups.  I will keep trying!

This was my best macro shots of the rain lilies from this afternoon.  I used some Color Efex Pro filters to try to liven up the image.  I think I needed more depth of field to have the entire bloom in focus.  But that would have rendered my background too much in focus.  So next time I should take my tripod with me outside, and make several images at different f-stops, and experiment with focus stacking…