Droplets
Welcome back! Last time I ended the blog with a few images of dew-covered leaves and talked about focus-stacking with macro shots. I’ve been experimenting more with this, and have learned a few things. At the same time I’ve been pretty diligent about getting up early on the weekends, and have enjoyed many a dawn sky and misty morning…which is of course where those droplets come from.
Let’s look at three different mornings:
Purple Dawn
The high clouds don’t fool anybody: there is plenty of moisture about, and my boots and pants are already soaked just walking through grass. There isn’t a breath of wind, which is great, because these grasses will quiver for any reason:
The above image is in black and white because those particular grasses themselves aren’t that colourful, and the highlight is the textures. But the next image mirrors the purple sky, and looks almost like candy:
The above images are focus-stacked, but I’ve yet to find a spot where that is revealed. The trick is finding a subject that is as flat to the plane of the lens as possible. This is what you want anyway, even when not focus-stacking, but to keep the background blurry you need an open lens, which means the focal plane is about half the width (or less!) of the grasses.
Orange Dawn
First light etches the goldenrod and grasses. It’s a drier morning, but there’s enough dew to give every blade and bud its own personal outline. There are also strange “tufts” in the grasses. They look like feathers or fluffy seeds, but looking closer, they are … dragonflies, hunkered tightly around the grass. They are absolutely covered in dew, eyes, wings and tail:
Eventually the sun drives away the chill, and a mosquito braves all to see if it can make a last summer meal of me, before the dragonfly can make a meal of it. The dragonfly stirs, wiping its eyes, while I wipe away the mosquito. The dragonfly gives its wings a flutter: it can’t shake the dew, but at least it can see better:
These images are also focus-stacked, requiring up to a dozen photos each just to get everything. With the angle of the wings it was impossible to get a flatter focal plane, so this is a tough test of the technique. I really lost myself in it, spending almost an hour just on this one dragonfly.
Further afield and a hike later, everything had pretty much dried up. I found some flowers which I don’t recall seeing before. They seem to have a very short seasonal window, so I could easily have missed them for all these years. In any case I liked their shape, and their tiny visitors.
This tiny aphid played peek-a-boo:
Meanwhile, this tiny fly perched confidently like a preacher addressing his flocklette:
Neither of these are focus-stacked, as the purpose is different here: the focus-stacked images are really just studies in detail; while these are attempts at “gesture and punctuation”…which is a whole other discussion.
Gray Dawn
Oh, it looks so tranquil, but it’s a lie: the mist moves quickly, clearing and pooling, thickening briefly then dissipating altogether. It plays havoc on compositions, and I scramble to keep up.
Dawn a few minutes earlier, in a different direction, not a hint of mist:
Still, it leaves behind a few treasures:
This tiny spider, no bigger than my pinky fingernail, a spider-droplet if you will, seems pretty content in her own little galaxy:
And thus the trilogy of dawns is brought to a close. I’m grateful for such rewarding conditions and the chance to explore new techniques. The weather is cooler, the mosquitoes are giving up, and dawn comes at 7am now, which is much easier to get up for.
It wasn’t all dawns, and I did get to go on a canoe trip, so I’ll end with an evening shot of that, with David playing pyromaniac 🔥😄 and his kids exploring the lake shore, looking for turtles:
Cheers to all, and take care!