Stasis, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Water drops on a spider web on a bright day following rain make me very happy. The web keeps the drops in stasis—still enough for effective macro photography.
Exposure data: Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens, 24mm extension tube, Nikon 6T close-up filter, 1/2 second at f/32 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.
Related image: Interstitial.
Water Drop Crossing, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
These two images of blades of grass wet with raindrops illustrate a digital solution to a technical photographic problem that could not be solved using film—and cannot be achieved in a solo digital capture. Some things just take more than one.
Consider that as you get very close to a macro subject that depth-of-field gets very shallow. Now suppose you want a great deal of your subject in focus—like all the drops of rain on the blades of grass shown in these two images. At the same time, you want a nice, soft focus background. Yum!
You can try a conventional approach: stopping your macro lens all the way down to the smallest aperture. Unless you are truly parallel to the subject, and the subject doesn’t have much width, you will not be able to get everything you want in focus. And stopping the lens all the way down probably means that the background soft focus will not be quite so dreamily soft.
The digital answer is focus stacking, which involves shooting multiple images at different focal points. Eac individual image can be shallow in terms of the depth-of-field.
The top image is made up of five orginals, and the bottom from seven. If you magnify the bottom image enough you’ll see a bit of unsharpness—but this comes from movement of the blade of grass in the wind, not technical focusing issues.
Once you have your set of originals, they can be aligned and combined in a Photoshop stack, as I explain in detail in Creative Close-Ups on pages 124-131.
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Interstitial, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
I combined six different captures of these tiny water drops caught in a spider’s web to capture the range of light coming from behind the leaves that the web rested on. The effect reminds me of a Gustav Klimt painting.
Exposure data: 200mm f/4 macro lens, 66mm of combined extension tubes, six combined exposures at shutter speeds from 2 seconds to 15 seconds duration, f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.
Recent water drop stories: Variegated Gladiolas; Papaver Drops; Water Drops category on Photoblog 2.0; my Water Drops set on Flickr.
Variegated Gladiolas, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
There’s a lovely clump of variegated gladolias in the garden. Partly shaded by a climbing rose, water drops cling to them in the early morning. A single drop reflects the world of these flowers.
I used my 200mm f/4 macro lens, a 36mm extension tube, and a +4 close-up filter. I exposed at ISO 200 for 1/4 of a second at f/36.
Papaver Drops, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
In the garden, water drops hang from a poppy bud, swinging at the end of its stem. Reflected in the drops, the flowers themselves are upright. You can see the poppies in the drops on the stem itself, as well.
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Both photos are tripod mounted. I used my 200mm f/4 macro lens, 36mm extension tube, and a +4 close-up filter.
In other words, these are very, very close, and magnified several times life size.
I stopped down for maximum depth-of-field at f/32. Using a setting of ISO 200, I exposed the top image at 1/60 of second and the bottom at 1/80 of second. While I was exposing for the bright water drops and not the darker background, I still intentionally underexposed so I could get a faster shutter speed, and so the bright areas wouldn’t “blow out.”
Hardenbergia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
The gentle rain turned to dappled sunshine, and I went out to photograph water drops in the garden. The drops shown here are decorating a tiny Hardenbergia, or Happy Wanderer, with a deep red Camellia flower in the bokeh in the background.
Photographed on tripod at f/36 with my 200mm f/4 macro lens and a 36mm extension tube.
Self Portrait with Rose, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
I offer this rose in the hope that the new year is prosperous and happy for us all, and on behalf of our new beginning, Katie Rose.
Drop City, photo by Harold Davis.
Close up, the water drops gathered on the petal of the Rio Samba Rose remind me of a city, or civilization, all huddled together on the side of a flower cliff.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro, 36mm extension tube, 1/30 of a second and f/36 at ISO 200, tripod mounted.]
Rosa ‘Rio Samba’, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
It rained over night. In the first light of the morning sun, I photographed the translucent petals of this Rose (Rosa ‘Rio Samba’), lush and drooping from the weight of the water.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens, 1/80 of a second at f/40 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.]
Angel Wings in the Morning Dew, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
Briefly noted: A detail of the petal of a Dawn Chorus poppy in the early morning, shot this spring and never post-processed or posted due to the flurry of events around the birth of Katie Rose.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens, 4 seconds at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Day Lily in Morning Dew, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
In the early morning, in a shady nook in my garden, I found this day lily in the morning dew.
At the close macro range of this photo, it’s hard to get all the flower in focus even with the lens fully stopped down. So I combined six different captures in Photoshop. Each capture had a different point of focus.
I’ve dubbed this technique HFR. You can read more about the technique, and see other examples, in High Focal Range (HFR), Red Flowering Dogwood Blossom, and Gaillardia x grandiflora. Overall, if done right, you can use this technique to get a subtle three dimensional effect, but not so 3-D that it is disturbing in the way those 3-D spectacles in the movies were.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, six captures combined in Photoshop, each capture using a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Caught in the Freesia Drops, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
After a night of gentle rain I went out into the garden on a bright, overcast windless morning. The patterns in these water drops on the freesias caught my attention (by the way, the shape reflected in the drops is a leucospermum flower).
Related stories: Sun Catcher, Sunrise in the Freesia Forest.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, +4 diopter close-up filter, 4/5 of a second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Fantasy in the Key of Freesia is another freesia and water drop image I haven’t blogged before:
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Wet Leaf, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
I saw this small leaf with water drops in our side yard and couldn’t resist taking the time to photograph it.
Related photo: another wet leaf macro.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, +4 diopter close-up filter, 1.3 seconds at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted using a Kirk Low Pod.]
I’ve written about using noise for aesthetic purposes. I’ve also explored the possibility that noise generated by boosting a camera’s sensitivity (ISO) will become a historical artifact and thing of the past. I’ve also explained my strategies for effective noise post processing.
It’s time to take a look at a technical challenge that decreased noise generation at higher ISOs solves.
The other day I went down the block to photograph apple and cherry blossoms close-up on a sun-drenched but windy afternoon following days of rain. The challenge here is that for these extreme macros I almost always want as much depth as I can get so that reflections in water drops and the surface of the blossom all are in focus. At ISO 100, my typical setting for quality work, this implies a long shutter speed even on a bright day. Shutter speeds longer than a second just don’t work when there is a breeze!
If I could get acceptable results in terms of noise, boosting the ISO would seem to be the solution. At higher ISOs it would seem to be easy to get the shutter speed up from the 5-10 second range to something like 1/25 of second. At 1/25 of a second, I would need the Gods of timing with me, but I could wait for a still moment and have a decent chance.
I think noise isn’t a detrimental issue in these photos, so boosting the ISO for maximum depth of field at faster shutter speeds works to make these technically “impossible” photos possible.
You can judge for yourself from these results. All were taken using my Nikon D300, tripod mounted, with my 200mm f/4 macro lens and a 36mm extension tube. The lens was stopped down as far as possible (with slight variations in recorded aperture, as noted), so the only significant exposure differences between the photos were ISO, shutter speed (and, on the other side of the exposure equation, the amount of available light at the time of the photo because natural light does not stay constant in the late afternoon).
ISO 1,000 at 1/25 of a second and f/36:
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ISO 640 at 1/60 of a second and f/36:
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ISO 640 at 1/60 of a second and f/40:
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For comparison, here’s a ringer, shot conventionally at ISO 100 and 6 seconds and f/45. The blossom was relatively steady despite the wind because of its position relative to the tree trunk. This was my last shot of the series as the sun set. I like the soft quality of the blossom in the sunset light, but you’d be hard put to say that the noise characteristics are significantly better than its high ISO bethren.
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Water Jewel, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
As sunshine came through the rain clouds I photographed this water drop on our peony bush. There’s nothing like a water drop formed by rain and lit by sunshine for creating a whole minature world of color.
Related images: Waterdrops on a Peony Leaf; Earth in a Drop of Rain; Drops of Sky; Mars Attacks.
[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, Nikon 5T close-up filter, 1/8 of a second at f/45 and ISO 100.]
