Earlier this year I posted a photo of some water droplets suspended in midair that I shot near the southeastern corner of the Oklahoma State University campus. Even though that image didn’t turn out exactly how I had hoped, I treated it as a learning experience and wanted to find ways to improve on the overall concept, since what good is it, I ask you, if we learn nothing from our mistakes? (A rhetorical question, obviously, but one that is always worth asking no matter how often it is repeated.) More than anything, I wanted to solve the issue of the water droplets in the original being just slightly blurry—the result, so I thought, of Vibration Reduction accidentally being enabled on my lens while shooting with a tripod. So I returned to the same spot weeks later with the same gear (105mm f/2.8 Macro lens and my Nikon D500) to see if I could rectify my mistakes and produce a better image.
In short…I did not. Despite shooting at 1/8000 second and disabling Vibration Reduction, the same problem remained: a slight bit of motion blur on the water droplets. I was a little surprised at the result since I had been so certain of the cause of the motion blur, but rather than pack my bags and head out I instead decided to go for something different entirely. Rather than use the water drops as my subjects, I found a tiny purple flower about one inch in diameter and decided to shoot that while using the the falling water as a background. I think it worked, but this gives me even more ideas to try in the coming weeks and months…
Probably the trickiest part about getting this shot was focusing on the flower. I had to use Live View since the whole setup was about 18 inches off the ground and I couldn’t really hunch down to look through the viewfinder, but unfortunately the Live View focusing in DSLRs is pretty bad for moving subjects like a tiny flower in the midst of a blowing breeze. I played with the aperture a bit, erring on the smaller side to give me a bit more depth of field wiggle room, and after many shots I finally got the one you see here. Strangely, the one thing that makes this photo work is the one thing I didn’t consider at all: tiny itty bitty drops of water on the flower itself. There were a couple of shots without those drops and they just don’t have the same punch or visual impact as this one, and I’m super thankful for that bit of serendipity that ended up elevating this image from mundane to…well, something a lot more interesting to look at :)
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