To make this image, first I needed one wet spider web with a colorful background. The web I found is shown in a somewhat more conventional image in Wet Web.

It was early in the morning, and the low-angled sun was adding saturated color to the scene. I switched to my 50mm macro lens and used Manual exposure controls to open the aperture all the way to f/2.8. Next, I dialed up the shutter speed so that it was fast enough (1/500 of a second) so that the motion of the spider web in the wind wouldn’t have much impact.

Up close and personal, I shot a series of “portraits” of individual waterdrops, with the idea of keeping one or two drops in focus but letting the background go out of focus so I could capture attractive bokeh in the frames.

Back at the computer, I combined the images using stacking—so that the brightest drops were the ones that appeared in the final Photoshop composite.

50mm macro, twenty exposures, each exposure shot for a duration of 1/500 of a second at f/2.8 and ISO 200, hend held; exposures combined in Photoshop Extended version using the Statistics script with mode set to Maximum.

Sea Palm Forest is another image of mine created unconventionally with stacking.