Photoblog 2.0

Alstroemeria and Water Drops, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Phyllis was kind enough to take the kids to school this morning. I spent my free time in the garden photographing water drops in the morning sun using my Kirk Low Pod and a new toy, a Nikon PC Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8 lens. This is an 85mm macro lens, roughly 127mm in 35mm terms. The “PC” isn’t short for “politically correct”; it stands for “perspective correction.”

In a way, this lens is back to the future for my thoroughly modern digital SLR. The Nikon PC Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8 provides some tilts and swings, like an old-fashioned view camera. But there’s no automation. Auto-focus doesn’t work. The light meter doesn’t work. This is a manual exposure affair (instant feedback via the LCD makes manual exposure a snap).

The lens doesn’t even stop itself down automatically. You set the f/stop manually, then press a lever to view and focus through the lens wide open (so you can see what you are doing). When you are ready to make an exposure, you press the little lever again first to stop the lens down.

The point of the lens are the tilts and swings, which (among other things) help with the depth-of-field problem of extreme close-ups. In addition, the lens is designed for maximum depth-of-field with an f/45 smallest aperture and an iris with more than usual blades, leading to an attractive bokeh on out-of-focus items at small apertures.

Using this lens does remind of those good old view camera days.

These images of water drops on our alstroemerias (Peruvian Lilies) captured with the rig I’ve described and and a 36mm extension tube. Each exposure approximately 0.4 of a second with the aperture set to f/45 for an effective aperture including the tilt and extension tube of about f/60.

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In Beauty Lies Salvation, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Life goes on. Julian is still in intensive care, doing as well as we could hope in the circumstances. Water drop on a terra cotta pot (in answer to a query on Flickr, the star is “real”). In beauty lies salvation. In photography is therapy.

Water Drops and Toad Lilies, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger.

These water drops on a spider’s web reflect the toad lilies (strange plants of the genus Tricyrtis) that bloom in the shade part of our garden this time of year.

Drop on a Dahlia, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

A water drop on the red dahlia in my garden in the morning…

Sea of Drops 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

Here are a pair of water drop photos, my last for a while.

I’m taking Julian (he’s nine now!) up to the mountains next week, and I expect to be putting water drop and garden photography on hold for a while.

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Origins of Life, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

Close up, these water drops on a web look like amoebas or some other primitive creatures to me. But in this photo, the water is evaporating, and you can pierce the veil to see the web:

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By the way, “piercing the veil” is a legal expression describing what you have to do to get at the human malefactors who may hide behind a corporate facade. It’s fun to use a legal trope to decribe water drops in my garden!

Twiggy, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

A good and bright morning in the garden, with the chance to photograph all these wonderful worlds of water.

Some of my water drop worlds are well defined with sunbursts, others look like stained glass, and still others are bright worlds that are more about sunlight than water.

The photo at the bottom of this series is part of the McClamp Bubble sequence, and shows my garden reversed and upside down in the water world!

Here’s a link to my water drop photo set on Flickr!

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Dahlia Light, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

These two photos represent a different “take” on the water drop theme: like Different Signals they are more about the effects of light on the drops, and less about the worlds within drops.

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Signals, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

This water drop photo differs from most of my water drop images because it is an exercise in selective focus and relatively low depth-of-field. It was exposed at f/8 for 1/80 of a second, and a single drop on the spider web strand is apparently sharp. More typically with these photos I stop the lens as far down as it will go, and make a much longer exposure.

Here’s more about my water drop photo techniques.

Getting the Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been photographing water drops. And that for me, each water drop is a world, as Blake put it, in a grain of sand. (Here’s a fairly complete selection of my water drop photos on Flickr.)

The two photos in this story are among my favorites of my recent water drop worlds. Everything seems to come together in the photograph of a single drop above: sharp focus on the drop, a nice sunburst, and a nice inner world showing the white Scabiosa atropurnea (”Snow Maiden”) that hosts the water drops and shows drops within the drop.

The photograph below shows a cosmos full of water drops, each caught by the thin filament of a spider’s web, and on and on into an apparent infinity.

Both photographs were captured with the same gear, and roughly the same setup. That is, my wonderful Nikon D200, my stupendous Nikkor 200mm f/4 macro lens, a 36mm extension tube and a +4 diopter close-up filter, mirror lockup, and a remote trigger. The single drop (above) was exposed at f/36 for 0.2 of a second, and the multiple drops (below) at f/40 and 0.8 of a second (both ISO 100).

To digress for a second, the 200mm f/4 Nikkor macro is as heavy as big telephoto lens (which it kind of is at 300mm 35mm equivalence). One of the things about it that really makes my life easier is the built-in tripod collar. The tripod collar lets me shift the center of gravity forward on the tripod (by mounted the lens rather than the camera). It also lets me change the orientation of the photograph by loosening the screw that holds the collar in place and rotating the lens. Meaning that I don’t have to move the camera at all. A big, expensive, special purpose lens. But well worth the price if you do much macro work.

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Web-a-licious, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

Compositionally, a photograph without a central item of particular interest can work when the photo is about a distinctive pattern. The scale of the pattern doesn’t really matter. Macro patterns (like the water drops on a spider web above) or trees on a snow-covered cliff in Yosemite’s winter (below) can be interesting.

Provided the pattern provides variety as well as homogeneity. And that the photograph has enough resolution so that the water drops or cliff side can really be scrutinized. With this kind of photograph, the viewer wants to believe it might be possible to delve into the pattern closer and closer without ever disrupting the suspension of disbelief.

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McClamp Bubble, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably know that about a year ago, I started a series of extreme close-ups of water drops on the flowers in my garden. You can see some of these photos on my blog in my Water Drop category.

Of course, one of the main technical challenges with this kind of photography (when I’m using available light rather than a strobe) is the motion of the flower and water drop. A partial answer to this problem is to use my McClamp The Stick (click here for the McClamp website). This piece of equipment keeps flowers from swaying in the breeze using a stake to anchor into the ground, flexible plastic piping, and a padded clamp to hold the flower. If you are really careful, it won’t even damage the flower!

In my photo “McClamp Bubble” (above), I attached the McClamp stick to a dahlia, and after it was attached turned on my irrigation system to get a natural looking set of drops (if I had attached the McClamp after spraying the flower, the drops would gave shaken off).

I was pleased to see how sharp this water drop looked when I opened the RAW file on my computer, and amused to see the McClamp stick reflected in it. At first I was going to discard the photo because of of the way you can see The Stick in it.

But, “on reflection,” the reflection of The Stick makes the photo more interesting to me (rather than less), because it helps to show within the photo the tools I used to make the photograph. I’m glad I kept it, and I hope you enjoy it!

Lobelia Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

This pair of water drop photos reminds me—and Solitaire on Flickr—of stained glass. They were taken first thing in the morning, down as low as possible, with the sun reflecting and refracting on a potted lobelia near our garden bench. I used my 200mm Nikon macro lens, naturally tripod-mounted, along with extension tubes and a +4 diopter close-up filter to get closer. This was one of those photo sessions that mean wiggling on one’s belly and getting covered with water and mud to find the right position. Thank you yoga and stretching exercises, and my kids for restoring my joy in playing with dirt!

I was asked about the photo below, “Is the drop real, or was it cloned in?”

I’m certainly not beyond cloning things in or out of photos (and I intend to discuss the techniques and ethics involved later in detail), but these are both pretty straight photographs, with only routine processing in Photoshop.

It’s interesting that some water drops are worlds, that one can look down into endless depths (here’s an example)—while others, like this pair, are colorful semi-translucent medallions. More like nature’s glass-blown jewelry than a trip into alternate realities.

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The force that through the green fuse, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

I get asked all the time how I make my water drop photos. For example:

I’ve seen many of your photographs and am really impressed with all the water drops. I’d like to know how you do it, and specifically what lens you use.

There really is no one answer to this question. Water drop photography is macro photography with some subject-matter specific difficulties. Macro photography in and of itself is one of the most technically difficult kinds of photography because once you get really close to a small object inherently shallow depth-of-field, precise focus, and motion—even the slightest motion—are all issues that can defeat a photograph, no matter how beautiful it would be otherwise.

What makes water drop photography a bit more difficult than run-of-the-mill photography of very small subjects is the extreme reflectivity of a water drop and the fact that a water drop is in almost constant motion (read more about these issues here).

In this story, I’ll address the equipment I use—and tackle some of the other technical issues related to water drop photography in future stories.

I use Nikon digital SLR equipment, right now a Nikon D200 body. As far as I am concerned, there’s no saying this is any better than any other brand, it is just what I happen to use. (For example, Canon is probably just as good.)

It’s also worth saying upfront that one can take perfectly good macro photographs with relatively primitive equipment provided the camera has a macro mode. For example, check out this photo of wedding rings that I took with a Canon Powershot G3. To get good results, you do need to be sure you are using a tripod, and know how to get the maximum depth-of-field from the camera.

My macro lens are a Nikon 200mm f/4 (used with the photograph above), a Nikon 105mm f/2.8 (the older, non-VR model), and a Sigma 50mm f/2.8. I often use Kenko extension tubes (I have two sets) with these lenses. I prefer these to the Nikon extension tubes because they retain automatic exposure in Aperture-preferred mode. Besides the extension tubes, I have close-up filters for these lenses, a lens reversal mount for the 105mm lens, and a Nikon PK-6 bellows.

I always focus macro lenses manually, and I use a magnifying eye piece for added precision.

I sometimes handhold macro shots with extension tubes and/or close-up lens and a VR (vibration reduction, also called image stabilization) zoom lens, like my 18-200mm Nikon zoom. (Here’s a photo taken with this technique.)

But most of the time I use one of my macro lenses, and these are invariably tripod shots, most often at the maximum possible depth-of-field, using mirror lock-up and the Nikon MC-36 remote to trigger the shutter.

I think my tripod is probably my most important piece of equipment. It is likely to outlast my D200, and probably most of the lenses I currently use as well. My tripod is a carbon-fiber Gitzo MK-2, which combines light weight with strength and agility.

To strobe or not to strobe, that is the question. Using flash as a light source with water drops replaces the natural light source with that created by the strobe (read more about this). When I do use flash with water drops, I use the Nikon wireless R1 close-up kit, which includes two Nikon wireless remote SB-R200 units. I also sometimes use a SU-800 unit connected via wireless to supply additional ambient light.

Leaving the hardware of photography aside for a second, my title for the photograph that started this story is “The force that through the green fuse,” after the Dylan Thomas poem. Here’s the first stanza of the poem:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

My point being: that at its best, photography of water drops, like all good art, is about the creative life force, the urges that make us live, breath, yearn and die. A powerful force runs through each water drop, but all too soon (from the photographer’s viewpoint) each drop ends in falling or evaporation, with new worlds to live or die wherever one’s lens is pointed next. Water drop photography is about capturing the brief life of an ephemeral and tiny world.

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Dropping, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

I’ve been trying for a long time to capture a water drop just as it, well, drops—and finally succeeded in this photo thanks to the magic of the Nikon wireless macro strobe kit, patience and fortitude, and good luck.

This may seem like an obvious thing to state, but the primary determinant of the appearance of a water drop photo is the light source used in the capture because the way the water drop looks depends on reflections within the drop. So using a flash on a water drop does stop the motion of the water drop, both its falling motion (as in this photo) and other movement like that caused by the wind and surface disturbances.

But the bad news is that you won’t get what you see (which is unlike natural light water drop reflections, where pretty much you know what the drop looks like). Sometimes if you are very lucky the resulting photo will be an interesting or beautiful image (like the strobe-generated reflection in the water drop below), but it will always be an artificial construct created with the magic of a flash of light.

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