Inspired by photographer Don Komarechka’s website, I did some macro photography over our Christmas vacation.  When the bird photography is limited by clouds, it’s time to break out the flash and the macro lens for some fun with flowers and water!

My first setup was to use a piece of clinging vine to cover in water droplets to photograph flower refractions.  I tried several green grasses from my yard, and this ivy was the only thing that I found where water beaded nicely.  I tried adding some glycerin to the water to help.  I found that I had to use focus stacking to get the entire snippet in focus.  It was my first focus stacking experiment, and it was harder than I expected.  Photoshop had trouble lining up all my images.  But I at least captured the spirit of what I was trying to photograph…

I’m used to using natural light for my photographs, so it was fun (and challenging) to use my flash to throw extra light on the ivy and the flower in the background.

Next I switched my setup to do some water droplet photography.  If you clean a piece of glass with RainX, then spray it with water droplets, the RainX makes the water bead nicely.  Add a flower behind the glass and you have a very pretty image…

I think I added a bit of blue gel to my flash for this image, which helped bring out the purple color in my flower.  This was a vast improvement over one of my last attempts at water droplet photography, when I didn’t have enough light and I didn’t get clear flowers in each of my water droplets.  A good lamp and a nice flash do wonders!

For the shot above I positioned a reflector underneath the flower.  I loved how the golden bubbles contrasted with the purple flower.

For my final image I added some Color Efex Pro effects to add some color casts to the image.

I used my iPhone to take a photo of the setup at some point in this little adventure.  I had a bowl of water nearby to use in reflections.  My cat Squirt decided to be my assistant and drink my water!  It’s impossible to do anything in our house without feline assistance… :)