There's a typhoon heading our way (it's the season for them), but I hate being indoors all day so I decided to head out for a while before the heaviest of the rain set in. 

As a way to remind myself of the photographic maxim that "it's the photographer, not the camera", I left the X-Pro 1 at home and went out with the modestly endowed but overachieving Digilux 2. If you've read previous posts, you'll know that this is an old digital camera with all of 5 megapixels, a crummy EVF, incredibly slow autofocus, battery life which is nothing to write home about....and some very, very nice image quality. I'd always shot it in RAW, but for a change I set it to JPEG fine, put the ISO at 200 (half way between the base of 100 and the top of 400) and went out. The weather was varying between almost no rain, a little, and then a whole lot.

Afterwards I put the JPEGs through colour efex pro and silver efex pro, and I was pretty impressed with what resulted.

Good place to be in this weather; free music and shelter from the rain.

Black and white version

Bus stop, in colour and b/w

This was some pretty heavy rain. Playing around with the settings in colour efex makes it easier to see the rain falling.

B/W version also looks good

I don't know exactly what colour efex has up its sleeve, but I love the way the colours came out here. Slightly otherworldly, but not OTT

Taking this as the new "basic" photo and then running it through silver efex also produces nice results

The Digilux 2 has a macro mode of sorts too, and given that there was so much water in the air, flowers are going to look nice

That is almost straight from camera, with a few minor adjustments.

One more street shot, again processed with colour efex and then turned b/w to good effect

Sure beats sitting at home, although as I type this it's raining steadily, the sky is dark-dark-dark, and...yeah, right now sitting at home is the better option!

Thanks for viewing, hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave comments.