In David Lynch’s wonderfully creepy classic film Blue Velvet you know you’ve entered an alternative and not altogether wholesame nether world when severed body parts start appearing at macro level in the grass.

In the Blue Velvet spirit, I am offering a prize to the first person to correctly identify the disembodied (so to speak) body part in this “wholesome” photo of water drops on two blades of grass. Please specify the body part, where in the photo it is to be found, and provide a theory as to whom it belongs. You can enter your guess or opinion as a comment on this blog story, or send me an email. I will be the sole judge as to accuracy and general craziness of any such submission.

The prize is a free copy of my new book Creative Black & White, shipped when it is available.

I shot this beautiful wet spider web by the early light of dawn on a foggy morning, then solarized it in Photoshop—more accurately, simulated a solarization effect—followed by a monochrome conversion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

View this image larger.

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.”

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.

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.

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.]