When it’s windy and cloudy and just plain gross outside, it’s the perfect time to pull out the macro lens and play with water droplet photography.

These pictures look so cool and are pretty simple to make. You find a petal or flower that water will bead on, and either spray it with a mister or place the water droplets with a syringe. Then you place a flower behind it. The image of the flower is refracted in the water droplets. Add a bit of light and press the shutter button. Just don’t squeal too loudly when you see the image or you might scare my cat Whiskey. ;-)

Water droplets are a great way to add interest to a flower photograph. For this image, I dropped the pansy in a tray of water, then misted it. I took several photos and then used Photoshop to focus-stack them. Squirt meowed at my feet the whole time because he knew I had pansies and he wasn’t allowed to nibble on them.

I used focus stacking for this final image, too. Daisies work really well for this kind of image as they show up nicely in the water droplets. You can use anything as a background in the refraction, though. That’s what makes this a fun rainy day project – there is plenty of scope for the imagination!