228 - Try a Little Tenderness

Hmm … no flowers tomorrow. Promised 🙂

I took this image Tuesday noon when I brought the Nikon 18-200 to my photo dealer. Monday afternoon I had to find out that at longer focal lengths I suddenly could not focus to infinity any more, neither via AF, nor manually. Well, things like that happen, and so I’ll have to do without it for one or two weeks. I guess we’ll survive it.

By the way, this is oleander. Note please, I know the name 🙂

I like oleander. In southern Italy the lanes of the highways are separated by oleander. Just imagine, you drive for hours and all the while there are blossoms around you. Beautiful.

The image was again taken with the Nikon 50/1.8 at f1.8 and post-processed with Nikon Capture NX (a little bit more saturation, soft vignetting and a crop). I did not use Photoshop, because this is one of the images where getting the colors right is peanuts with NX and real work in Photoshop. The reason is, that NX uses the same defaults that the camera uses to produce the JPEG, whereas Camera RAW always looks different. This is no problem when I want to work on the colors anyway, but when not, then it’s much easier with NX.

In this case I liked the tender colors, and “Try A Little Tenderness” is the Song of the Day. Many people have sung it, but I’m talking about Andrew Strong in the fantastic 1991 Alan Parker movie “The Commitments”. It’s about a young man in Dublin who wants to put together a band, and they would play Soul, Dublin Soul. Brothers and Sisters, if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor. There’ll be no regretting.

Here’s the soundtrack.