In my last post I wrote about photographing pansies under a hose.  After I finished playing with the flowers, I was inspired to try a different take on my Colorful Water Droplet experiment.  With my first colorful water droplets, I focused close on a single water droplet as it dripped from my kitchen faucet.  The setup was surrounded by colorful cloth, which reflected in the water droplets.  Well, I decided to take those same colorful cloths outside and see what I could do with photographing hundreds of tiny water droplets as they sprayed from the hose.  Suffice it to say, I got soaked!  But I had fun.

This is an iPhone picture of my setup.  I had my hose set up to spray from a treetop.  Then I draped my colorful fabric over some gardening posts.  (A bunch of clothespins are awesome additions to a camera bag – they can be used to secure flowers for macro shots, tie down cloths for crazy flower experiments, and dozens of other random uses!)   Finally I took my macro lens and focused close on the falling water.  (Rich made sure to tell me I was crazy.  I’m sure he was right.)

My first shots were with no flash, using aperture priority to minimize depth of field.  I captured the water droplets as they fell, with the pale colors of the cloth coming through as a background.  It was a pretty, soft image, but not exactly what I was looking for…

When I experimented with some of these shots on the computer, I had fun with some creative effects.  I sharpened and adjusted the contrast in the image to make the colors more vibrant.  Then I used some Flaming Pear Flexify to twist the droplets into an interesting shape.  A little Twist gave it an interesting center, which made me think of some of the Hubble pictures of distant galaxies.  So I finished off my image with some Glitterato to add some stars.  This is one of the weirdest creative images, but I kinda like it!

OK, back to the in-camera effects.  I liked the effect of a slow shutter speed that captured the falling droplets.  But they didn’t reflect much of the color around them.  So I added a flash, decreased my shutter speed to 1/8000, and moved my cloth so that I would shoot into the afternoon sun, which would provide a little rim light for my drops.  Rich kindly came outside to be my assistant for a few minutes – he held my flash while standing safely away from the hose.  But I didn’t realize there would be so many drops, and the sun’s backlight caused the background drops to become little white circles.  I recovered some of the foreground droplets with sharpening in Photoshop, but this wasn’t exactly the image I set out to make…

Again, I had fun post-processing on the computer.  I used some Color Efex Pro filters to adjust the color tones, then I used Flaming Pear’s Flexify filter to create an interesting pattern with the image.  It reminds me of two cat eyes staring at me from the depths…

I found that these droplet pictures were fun to take into Fractalius, then warp to create textures.  One of the textures was used in my last post as an overlay for a pansy water droplet shot.  This last image still conveys (to me, at least) the feel of a gentle summer rain.

All in all, I had a great time in my backyard with my camera!  I wonder how many strange looks I got from the neighbors? :)