Colorful Water Droplets, Part 2

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In my last post I wrote about photographing pansies under a hose.  After I finished playing with the flowers, I was inspired to try a different take on my Colorful Water Droplet experiment.  With my first colorful water droplets, I focused close on a single water droplet as it dripped from my kitchen faucet.  The setup was surrounded by colorful cloth, which reflected in the water droplets.  Well, I decided to take those same colorful cloths outside and see what I could do with photographing hundreds of tiny water droplets as they sprayed from the hose.  Suffice it to say, I got soaked!  But I had fun.

This is an iPhone picture of my setup.  I had my hose set up to spray from a treetop.  Then I draped my colorful fabric over some gardening posts.  (A bunch of clothespins are awesome additions to a camera bag – they can be used to secure flowers for macro shots, tie down cloths for crazy flower experiments, and dozens of other random uses!)   Finally I took my macro lens and focused close on the falling water.  (Rich made sure to tell me I was crazy.  I’m sure he was right.)

Colorful water droplets setup
Colorful water droplets setup.  Notice Rich’s turtle contemplating my experiment!

My first shots were with no flash, using aperture priority to minimize depth of field.  I captured the water droplets as they fell, with the pale colors of the cloth coming through as a background.  It was a pretty, soft image, but not exactly what I was looking for…

Pale Droplets
Pale Droplets

When I experimented with some of these shots on the computer, I had fun with some creative effects.  I sharpened and adjusted the contrast in the image to make the colors more vibrant.  Then I used some Flaming Pear Flexify to twist the droplets into an interesting shape.  A little Twist gave it an interesting center, which made me think of some of the Hubble pictures of distant galaxies.  So I finished off my image with some Glitterato to add some stars.  This is one of the weirdest creative images, but I kinda like it!

The Jess Nebula!
The Jess Nebula!

OK, back to the in-camera effects.  I liked the effect of a slow shutter speed that captured the falling droplets.  But they didn’t reflect much of the color around them.  So I added a flash, decreased my shutter speed to 1/8000, and moved my cloth so that I would shoot into the afternoon sun, which would provide a little rim light for my drops.  Rich kindly came outside to be my assistant for a few minutes – he held my flash while standing safely away from the hose.  But I didn’t realize there would be so many drops, and the sun’s backlight caused the background drops to become little white circles.  I recovered some of the foreground droplets with sharpening in Photoshop, but this wasn’t exactly the image I set out to make…

Sparkles in the Sun
Sparkles in the Sun

Again, I had fun post-processing on the computer.  I used some Color Efex Pro filters to adjust the color tones, then I used Flaming Pear’s Flexify filter to create an interesting pattern with the image.  It reminds me of two cat eyes staring at me from the depths…

Eyes of the Cat
Eyes of the Cat

I found that these droplet pictures were fun to take into Fractalius, then warp to create textures.  One of the textures was used in my last post as an overlay for a pansy water droplet shot.  This last image still conveys (to me, at least) the feel of a gentle summer rain.

Falling Rain
Falling Rain

All in all, I had a great time in my backyard with my camera!  I wonder how many strange looks I got from the neighbors? :)

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