Tridrop

This is one of those images that’s more of an exploration of a concept than a great finished photograph, but that’s also the same reason I kind of like it. I don’t know that I’ve come across a scene quite like this one before, and it was fun to get the opportunity (or challenge, more accurately) to photograph it. I was walking through the OSU formal gardens one afternoon when I came across this drop of water nestled between three leaves, and something about it just kind of struck me as kind of captivating. It’s almost a case study in the concept of surface tension: the droplet is just sitting there, minding its own business, and holding itself together with the power of physics and, perhaps, its own sheer will.

So how to photograph it? That’s a good question, and while I don’t think I got quite what I was attempting, it was fun to try. I thought about taking this shot from a side perspective, but I’ve done that before with drops on leaves and wanted to try something new. Top-down seemed like the right idea, especially since that was how I was looking when I was walking past and saw this. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, set to f/22 and Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/200 second. (Resulting ISO was 2200, but honestly anything up to 6400 looks just fine on my D750.) I would have liked the water drop to be a little sharper but that’s kind of the classic problem when doing close-ups of subjects like this. You can either get the reflection in focus or the drop doing the reflecting, but usually not both unless you use super small apertures or bust out Photoshop for some focus-stacking. I do like the fun swirls of white sky and earth tones, which are likely just the brick walls of the surrounding buildings, that you can see in the drop and even though the extra elements like dark green leaves in the lower-right corner are a bit of a distraction, I don’t mind them as much as I thought I would.

In the end this was a fun image to take and while I won’t be printing it and hanging it on my wall anytime soon, I do think I learned a few things in the process of creating it and honestly that’s what really matters the most.