Experiments that don't work

A couple of weeks ago I saw an image in the magazine, Digital Photo of four water droplets on a grass stalk that each showed a perfection reflection of the same flower. It was a stunning shot and I was desperate to do something similar but with water droplets on a sheet of glass.

I made a reasonable start by building a wooden frame on which I could place my sheet of glass. This fits onto a retort stand and can be slid up and down to whatever height I wish as I know the distance between the object and its reflectors and between the camera and the water droplets will be critical.

Using a 50mm macro I then set my camera up above the glass sheet onto which I had placed three drops of glycerine. Fortunately my tripod has a centre column which can be set horizontally so that i could place the camera dirtectly above the spots of glycerine. I was using using Live View with magnification so that I could focus manually with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

I tried intitially with a carnation bloom but found it almost impossible to get an adequate dof to get focus throughout the flower even though my camera was stopped right down to f32.

I decided that I needed something flatter and went outside to get a copper beach autumn leaf. I found that even that I was struggling to get adequate focus as you can see from my blip.

Finally I tried using a map page in which I hoped to get islands of clarity against a fuzzy map background but the convexity of the the glycerine drops even made that difficult to achieve. So I guess it's back to the drawing board.

Hence I give you one of my failures and appeal to anyone who can throw light of this to enlighten me.