Indulging My Passion for Photography: Water droplets

Ok.. so my latest obsession is with water droplets - the first project was to capture the water droplets and freeze the motion which I spent ages on doing. I even went and got myself the faster lens when I realized that my kit lens is no match for the kind of speed I need and the precision. I spent hours trying to get one droplet to form, but it was a no-show.

I got images like this and didn't just get to see the droplets bounce off the surface of the water. I was using a piece of rag supersaturated with water and dropping big drops into the bowl. Somehow, didn't work no matter how hard I tried.

I finally got a bit of action - but not enough to make me happy. I applied post-processing to this to bring out the highlights.

The next thing I did was to buy a tripod and then subsequently the faster lens for the next set. I set up my little gig in the kitchen, for want of a better place, and I still got a bit of glare in the water since my kitchen lighting wasn't the best. But I did get the effect I was after.

This was the ripple when the droplet hit the surface

This was caught in motion

The trick was to use big drops of water, a continuous shooting mode on shutter priority. And I always use a timer on the camera when trying to take these precision shots. It avoids all the camera shake that you can possibly avoid. And oh, the mirror lock-up if it's available on your camera is another good way to avoid the minutest of shakes when the shutter drops.

Now the project I then decided to undertake was capturing reflections in a water droplet. Simple trick that yields beautiful results.

At 1:30 am my creative juices started flowing (as they are always wont to do at that ungodly hour) and I staged this - I sprayed water on one of my more colourful plants and then looked for the reflection. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my kit lens ( I was too lazy to switch to my zoom lens) took fairly decent macro-style shots of the droplets. I shot in raw, but didn't shoot in the highest quality. Therefore, I lost some resolution when cropping the photo to make the droplet stand out.

Here's a sampling of what I got from my first attempt. Click on the photos if you want to enlarge them.

Watch out for the drops hanging from the leaf as well. Each of them has a reflection, but it's not all that clear in this pic since I only used a single point of focus here. The little hint of blue is actually the placemat on the table that's being reflected in the drops.