Woman on a Mission

For the last week, I have been obsessed with my macro lens and water drops on flowers.  More specifically, I have been obsessed with capturing refracted images on waterdrops.  I have had a bit of a time doing it, actually.  The first two days I tried it, I all but threw up my hands in surrender- I couldn’t even get anything I wanted to appear in the drops. But I have finally had some success!

Here is my orchid plant reflected in a water drop on my jade plant. Somehow this was easy. Off camera flash helped illuminate the drops. And the photo is flipped, by the way- the refracted image is always upside down.

My next goal was to get the image to appear in more than one water drop at a time- harder!  What became difficult was not getting the image to appear, but to get the drops in the right places so they were in the same focal plane. Yoiks! I ended up using drops of Karo syrup on a wilting Gerbera daisy (no daisies were harmed in the making of this photograph).  I did get drops that stayed- but they were small.  And in the quickly fading after dinner light, I needed a lot of flash.

The last photos were taken at f/40- just for the sake of depth of field.  I know these are not ideal settings.  These images are greater than life size- the real drops were very tiny.  I next plan to take some photos where the flower looks more pleasing- these look to me like they’re from another planet!  But that’s for another day, another week, another month . . .