Macro water droplets.

OK, the brief looked relatively easy and there was interesting information to assist with the set up of this project. Fundamentally the brief was on Red Bubble, and was about getting a piece of glass making some water droplets and photographing the results.

So Off I went and bought some Rain X at Supercheap, some colored pencils at the cheap shop and I got a piece of glass from a photo frame at home and started playing around with a set up. Flash was too had as I had to soften it down a bit, so I tried natural light which meant bumping up ISO to 500 and that was another issue.

So you set up the piece of glass, mine was around 35cm off the floor and I cleaned the glass with rain X and I used Glycerin to make the bubbles as water was still really "blobby" even with the rain X

I used a Canon 7D with 70-200, but then changed to 15-85 and to be honest it was not much different as neither lens does Macro really well and I think that was my major shortcoming, no Macro Lens

Add This was using the 70-200 and I focused on the pencil reflections in the droplets, 1/60th at f5.6.

 I found it difficult to get the edge of the water bubbles and the reflection in the bubbles both in focus at any time. The above image at 1/60th even with IS turned on still wasn't brilliant. Not if you looked at the test image on Red Bubble which is awesome, it is sharp and clear and amazing.

Same details but this is out of camera with no contrast adjustments or tonal adjustments which I made in the first image.

Complete with stray hair this is using flash with some muslin over it. Interesting effect worth pursuing but not what I was trying for!

This time I used the 15-85 and 1/125 at f6.3. The light didn't really allow much more flexibility with settings.

 OK, so all photography is about learning, so what have I learned? That a Macro lens would be nice, as my lenses don't seem to want to go in any closer and I have cropped all of these images.

I have also learned that ISO500 is noisy in this example when you are stretched for light anyway.

My final learning is that nothing is as simple as it looks!

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