Tag Archives: water

Macro

Macro Photography: A flower as seen through a water droplet

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I’ve seen this type of photo circulating online for a while and have always wanted to try and capture it myself. Since I didn’t get a decent macro lens until last December, and at that point all the grass and flowers were covered in snow, I finally got out today to give it a shot. After capturing the dandelion in the water droplet (as seen below), I decided to have a little photography fun. Check out my “Help! I’m trapped in a water droplet” photo on Flickr.

Capture a flower in a water droplet

Canon 60D | 100mm Macro Lens | 1/6 | f/18 | ISO 100 | RAW

Wondering how I took it? Here’s a walk-through of what I did so you can try it on your own.

Beyond the photography equipment, I also needed a squirt bottle and scissors. Oh yeah… and long grass and a few flowers, too!

I found my spot of long grass in my backyard, and after setting up the camera on the Manfrotto tripod really close to the ground, I whipped out the squirt bottle. I began squirting the grass just in front of the camera lens (NOTE: If you do this, put your hand over the end of the lens so you don’t get water droplets on your glass). Once the water started to collect on a blade of grass, I arranged my camera as close as I could while being able to focus.

I then pulled a bright yellow dandelion from my front yard (it was the only “flower” I had on hand) and placed it just behind the droplet. Just be careful and don’t hit the blade of grass that has the droplets on it or you’ll have to re-spray. After snapping off a test shot, I noticed a few blades of grass that I didn’t like. That’s where the scissors came into play. I did a little lawn mowing to eliminate rogue blades.

It took some patients and rearranging to get it just right, but it is doable. The sun was directly behind me and lower in the sky, so it reflected in the droplets. When I tried to stand in the way to block the sun, my silhouette ended up reflected in the photo, which seemed more out of place than the reflecting sun. I also played with quite a few settings on the f/stop for different depth of field looks.

I hope those are enough details, but if you have any other questions, let me know and I’d be happy to share more info if needed.

~signed, Carltonaut

Just for fun

Red Strawberry Splashing into Goblet

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I put a photo challenge out to some friends to capture something red. So I took the challenge upon myself and pulled some strawberries out of the fridge. I grabbed one of two goblets my wife and I received more than 11 years ago when we got married. I topped off a pitcher of water and grabbed a few dish towels – I knew this was gonna get pretty messy.

After setting up the goblet and firing off a few test shots, I was ready to begin dropping some strawberries. But so were my kids. I was a little nervous that a slightly misplaced drop could tip the goblet and shatter it on the table. While that would have made for a great stop-motion capture, I didn’t want to try and explain to my wife why I broke one of our wedding gifts for a measly photo.

Red Strawberry Drops into Goblet

Canon 60D | 50mm lens | 1/250 | f/2.5 | ISO 200 | Canon Speedlite 430 EXII | RAW

I let my six-year-old daughter release the shutter for a few shots, and I let my son drop the strawberry. I am happy to report there were no goblet casualties. We fired off quite a few shots, and were pretty pleased with most of the results. Some were a millisecond too early, while others were a second too late. Lucky for us, we had a few that were spot on.

If anyone is thinking of taking a similar shot, here are a few of the challenges I sought to overcome in the photo.

  • Avoiding the reflection of the flash in the goblet was hard. I had to move the off-camera flash pretty high up – probably at a 60-degree angle to the goblet. 
  • The goblet wanted to distort the background, so when I initially tried to put a black cloth behind it, my cloth wasn’t big enough to capture the entire background. For that reason, I resorted to the shutters to our sliding glass door, and adjusting them to allow just the right amount of light in.
  • In many of the photos, there is a dark shadow in the background. That’s because once the strawberry was let go, the hand doing the releasing didn’t get out of the way of the flash fast enough. It was better to drop the berry from a greater height to avoid this dark shadow in the background.
  • To help in the targeting process of the drop, wet the strawberry and once you have the drip of the berry landing in the center of the goblet… let go. The berry should drop in the same place as the drop.
  • Fill the glass to the brim to increase the amount of splash that exits the goblet. In this case, the more the merrier!

It was a fun photo to shoot, but as you can see, it’s not perfect. I guess this means I will just have to try the photo again… someday. 

~signed, Carltonaut

Macro

Capturing the water drop and splash is tedious

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After spending 20 minutes getting everything setup for the shot – the catch basin filled and positioned, the water dropper aligned, flash settings configured and synced with the camera, the tripod arranged and the Canon 60D positioned – I just had to keep shooting until my camera card was full. Needless to say, I had a ton of photos to comb through, many of which had no splash or were underlit.

I was glad to have shot in RAW so I could make any adjustments to help highlight or change the look for the photo to accentuate different aspects. I created a set on Flickr with my favorites from the photo shoot, but here is my favorite shot from this go-around.

Off-target Water Drop Splash

I’m sorry I don’t have the camera settings listed for this photo. I’ve already pulled them from my camera and am not able to see them (that I know of anyway).

I like this photo because the ripples in the water area creating a sort of target, with the objective being a splash dead center. However, the water drop that is milliseconds from splashing into the water is slightly off target, which I feel adds to the interest in the photo.

~signed, Carltonaut

Black & White, Macro

Capturing Ice and Fire in Photographs

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My kids looked at me like I was crazy when I poured nearly boiling water into an ice cube tray, gently placed 10 candle wicks into the water and ever so carefully placed the tray into the freezer.

I think I got more funny looks from them when I placed the cubes on a black foam sheet, grabbed a lighter and started running the flame around the cube. The flame helped shine up the cube to make it more transparent, and it also allowed me to shape the cube and create a puddle around it to offer an additional visual element.

My Canon Speedlite 430EXII flash with a blue gel across it was set on the left, with my LED Flashmate set to maximum on the right. My 100mm 2.8 macro lens was mounted to my Canon 60D and focused in on the cube. Once I had the shot arranged and fired off a few test shots, I lit the wick and started snapping.

Captured Ice and FIre

Canon 60D | 100mm 2.8 macro lens | 1/50 | f/2.8 | ISO 100 | Addtl. Lighting | RAW

In total, I lit six ice cubes and snapped more than 100 photos. It took a bit to check all of them out, but I am very pleased with the final outcome. And even though I shot the photos with the intent of showing them in color, I de-saturated some of the RAW photos to make them black and white, adjusted the temperature and eventually the levels to get the look that I thought best represented ice and fire.

Check out more of the photos I captured, including the ones that are in color, on my Flickr page.

I’m gonna give this setup another go, hoping to achieve a more transparent cube. I will try bringing the water to an actual boil, as I’ve heard that helps get some of the air bubbles out. I’m also going to try freezing the wicks before I insert them into the water to see if that will help make the cube clearer. In short, I am not ready to give up on this concept – it just might take me a bit to get everything reset and have the time to give it that other go.

~signed, Carltonaut

Just for fun, Macro

Capturing the floating paperclip

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The paperclip was merely a tool I was using for a completely different capture, but I loved the way it turned out and couldn’t resist sharing it.

Floating Paperclip

Canon 60D | 100mm 2.8 macro lens | 1/13 | f/8.0 | ISO 400 | Flash+LED Flashmate

My real intent was to capture water droplets impacting the water. I had spent a good portion of my day off getting everything together for a contraption that would allow me have a drop hit the same point every time, thus taking the guess work out of my focus.

Once everything was set up, I needed something to allow me to mark where that point on the water is. In rummaging through our catch-all drawer in the kitchen, I found a paperclip. Since I know from my science days paperclips can float on water, I grabbed it out, bent one part so I had a handle, and gently placed it on the surface of the water, underneath where the water drops would make impact.

Once I had the camera focus set on that point, I was ready to take my shots of the drops – but I snapped a few photos of the paperclip as it floated out of position, just for kicks. Well, nearly an hour later, the paperclip photo was my favorite capture of the whole evening. I ran into some reflection challenges with the water drops, so I’m still waiting until I get one that “moves me” before I share it publicly.

Oh, and the reason the paperclip has a red tint to it is because I placed a red gel over my Speedlite 430EXII flash, which was placed level with the surface of the water, just to the left of the bowl, and wirelessly triggered using my on-camera flash.

Enjoy the photo, and know that yes – paperclips can float on water thanks to the surface tension offered up by a bowl of H2O.

~signed, Carltonaut

Black & White, People, Travel

Decisions: Black and white OR color

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My last blog post shared a photo of my daughter running along the beach with the low-setting sun. Another photo I shot at that same San Franciscan beach was of my son collecting a few of the bazillion sand dollars that littered the beach. I love the innocence of this photo, too, along with the reflection of my son in the water retreating from the beach.

I am thinking of printing the photo on canvas and hanging it in our home. But I am torn between the black and white version of the photo, or the color version. I really like his blue jacket, but I’m not a fan of the orange color of his face. The black and white kills both of those elements, but still makes it a great photo.

If you were printing this for your home, would you go black and white OR color?

Gabe-Beach-5x7
Gabe-Beach-5x7BW

~signed, Carltonaut

GoPro, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit

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I must confess that the idea for this photo came from my wife. When I read the challenge on Friday, I wasn’t sure what I could do and thought I would end up spending a lot of time thinking, or even over-thinking, the challenge. But when I mentioned it to my lovely wife, she pointed out that we were going kayaking the next day, which could be a great representation of the Free Spirit photo challenge.

090112 Free Spirit Kayaking

Although I would have loved to take my Canon 60D out on the kayak with me, my nightmare of losing the camera into the water got the better of me. But, I had my GoPro, dive housing and a 16 GB SD card, so I headed out on the lake.

After getting out into the water, I took a few shots from under the water – but worried that the green, murky water didn’t bode well for a great photo, so I took some shots from the surface, capturing the kayak on the water, with the stark contrast of the white clouds and blue sky above. I wish I had a floating contraption that would have allowed me to not stretch out my arm and have it be that awkward part of the photo, but I made do with what I had.

Once I got home and surveyed the photos, I found the one above and brought it into Photoshop. I made some minor adjustments to the levels, and thought I would also make some adjustments to the saturation – just to give it a slightly different look. I thought a lens flare would look good on the photo, but then my purist thoughts got the better of me. I didn’t want to doctor the photo and add elements I hadn’t captured in the shot.

As for the free spirit part of the photo… I love kayaking. I love paddling my way out onto a lake, setting the paddle across the cockpit and floating there on the water. It is a great way to escape from the hussle and bussle of life and simply enjoy nature. Regardless of how rough the lake water is, I enjoy getting away from shore.

With Labor Day marking the unofficial end of summer, I am not sure how many more kayaing trips my family and I will be able to get in before things start to get a little chilly and eventually ice over, but for a Labor Day weekend, it was a great end to the summer vacations!

~signed, Carltonaut

GoPro, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement

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I was vacationing with my family in Bear Lake when I saw the email on my iPhone about this week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge. I went through my camera bag to survey my equipment and made a game plan for Saturday to capture movement.

GoPro? Check. Waterproof case? Check. Boat? Check. Tube? Check.

Let the photography adventure begin.

Once we got the troubled boat out of the harbor (long story), we loaded it up with life jackets and family (ages 3 to 65) and headed out on the water. When it was my turn to get into the tube, I grabbed my GoPro and jumped in. My sister got in the other tube and off we went.

I originally set my GoPro on video, but once my sister fell off, I switched over to a photo every 0.5 seconds and the boat floored it. My goal, as weird as it sounds, was to get a cool “biffing” shot, and so I was pretty excited when I went through my photos at the end of the day and found this photo mixed amidst a ton of other ones only half as cool.

070712 Water Impact

I found some other outtakes from the day’s events and shared them on my Facebook page. Check em out!

~signed, Carltonaut

Alphabet Photo Challenge, Just for fun

Food coloring and water – who knew?

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One of the many photo challenges I follow, and have been pretty good at contributing regularly, had the letter W for last week’s challenge. Even though my last post was the photo of my daughter on a watery slide, that wasn’t the real photo I wanted to share for the challenge, but time had gotten the better of me.

But I grabbed a little time last night and set up a little attempt to capture food coloring splashing into a glass vase filled with water (here’s the best outcome of that attempt). However, the lighting wasn’t the greatest, and I couldn’t get the outcome I had in mind. But when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. So here is the shot I ended up with, and was pretty content with the final outcome.

061012 FlowingBlue

Canon 60D | 55-200mm lens | Sadly, I don’t have the other details (I had to clear the card for another photo assignment for work and didn’t grab the other details before deleting)

That’s one of the things about photography – you can picture the photo in your mind, but for one reason or another it doesn’t come out the way you were hoping. But that just means you have to problem solve the issue, fix it, and try again. Which is exactly what I am going to do… eventually!

Some notes about the photo – I used a zoom lens to see how that would affect the lighting; the flash kept reflecting in the glass vase, so I stopped using it; I shot in raw so I could adjust WB afterward; I placed a white tissue-paper table cloth in the background so it wasn’t as distracting with kitchen cupboards.

~signed, Carltonaut

Alphabet Photo Challenge, GoPro

Alphabet Photo Challenge: W is for Watery Slide

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I had a really cool shot in mind for this week, using the word Water for W. However, it’s been a crazy week yet again, so I didn’t have the time to set up the shot and take it. But eventually I will, and I think the wait will be worth it.

Anyway, during a birthday party today for my niece, my daughter went on a trip down the watery slide (slip and slide). She was gracious enough to take the GoPro down with her; I’d set it to take a photo every .5 seconds and ended up with this one that was the best.

060912 W is for Waterslide

Did anyone else photograph something for the letter W this week? Now on to the Weekly Photo Challenge from WordPress – Friendship.

~signed, Carltonaut