Glowstick

Here’s a fun water droplet shot I made from a bouquet I bought for my fiancée. I noticed this beautiful orange flower starting to wilt… and thought I’d try to make a nice photo with it before it deteriorated too far. View Large by clicking on the image!

Ingredients: plant leaf, spray bottle, and flower. The flower is held in place with a “third hand” tool that use for some of my tabletop macro work, and I encourage all macro photographers to have at least one of these.
Check Amazon for a whole variety.

The leaf is also held in place by one of those tools, and sprayed with water from the spray bottle until it’s covered in droplets. Some plants form much better droplets then others, so it’s helpful to experiment with a few options. I’m not even sure what this plant was called.

I line the camera up so I can see through the droplets, turning them into little lenses and refracting an image of the flower behind them. The refracted images here also contain the surface of the leaf with other droplets and their own refractions… deliciously recursive! Handholding the camera, I shot maybe one hundred frames at different focus points, and I ended up putting 29 of them together to complete the image.

Crop to taste, and you’re done! The editing process is nearly identical to the one I use for snowflakes and spelled out in exhaustive detail within the pages of Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes – the fundamentals of macro photography stay the same.