Waterdrop Worlds

The other day I thought I'd try taking some photos of flowers reflected in waterdrops. Most people probably try this kind of photography after it rains with plants available in their garden. However for me this sudden interest struct late one night and on a dry night at that. Not wishing to pass up a moment of creativity, I grabbed a couple of pot plants from the garden and brought them inside. I used a water spray bottle to simulate rain on the flowers and created some nice waterdrops. I was ready to start photographing.

For this shoot I used my Canon EOS 7D with an EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM lens and 37mm of extension. This gave me about 1.7x magnification or about 13mm edge to edge on the long axis. Since focus was critical I also used a Manfrotto Tripod and macro focusing rail and since I was going for maximum magnification I used 10x live view to focus manually on the images within the waterdrops. Lighting was provided by two off camera speedlite 430ex II flash units with defusers, triggered via the 7D's wireless flash capabilities. One flash provides side lighting to the main subject and the second one provides lighting for the subject in the water drops.

When doing flash macro work I set my camera to Manual mode with a Shutter speed as fast as my flash sync will allow and a low ISO. In this case I used 1/250 and ISO 100. Then I set the aperture to what ever I would like for depth of field and allow the flash to expose the image. The only side effect of this technique is that if the ambient light is too low then the background will be very dark. I don't mind this effect since it draws more attention to the subject. A third flash to blast the background might fix this problem but I've never tried this.

One drawback about shooting in the house was that these water drops act as very effective wide angle lenses and much care needs to be taken to avoid including artifacts (like light switches on the wall) from being included in the waterdrops. Another technical problem I encountered was that my defusers were square shaped and these square shapes show up in the drops, since waterdrops are spherical, at some point on the surface of these drops, the angle will be perfect to reflect the flash into the lens. I personally find the square shape quite objectionable. Next time I will use round defusers since a circular shape looks more natural on waterdrops.

What follows are a couple of my favourite shots from this session. All image were take with the same settings. Only the camera angle and flash location changed.

For the first shot I focused on the largest water drop I could find. These drops are quite small, about 2-3 mm in diameter perhaps because of their method of creation. I'd like a stronger macro lens to really fill the frame with just one drop.



Next I tried to line up my relatively shallow plane of focus so it cut through the most interesting part of the two main droplets of water on this flower bud. That involved a lot of micro adjusting of camera position. Here a macro focusing rail allows fine tuning in the z axis but changes in the x and y axis were brutish at best. More time and patients might have yielded a sharper image but none the less it's a good start.



This last image was interesting. The main flash was a little further away thus creating a darker image. However the main water drop is acting like a magnifing glass for the flash light and creating a spotlight effect on the flower bud. The area around the spotlight is darker since the light for this area has been focused away by the water drop.