Water Drops on Grass
This picture story is about the wonder of water. The great thing about water is that you never know exactly what it is going to do, and taking photos of it can lead to some nice surprises.
f4.5 at 1/160s -0.3eV 56 mm (325 mm equivalent) 2816 x 2112 Canon S3
Essence: I took the original photo of water drops on blades of grass shown above in a flower bed at about 5:15 in the evening in California. With the sun shining from the left, there was a good amount of contrast and some interesting shadows. I used the S3's regular macro setting rather than the super macro, for two reasons. First, there was the water. The sprinkler head above and to the left precluded getting too close. Secondly, it allowed me to have a narrow field of view so I could leave out of the frame many of the surrounding plants. The setting of -0.3eV was to avoid blowing out the highlights on the drops too much.
Accident: As it turned out, the shutter speed was just the right length to see some interesting effects with the water. As the drops from the sprinkler emerge, they are often not spherical and they spin as they fly. The sun caught several of them as they tumbled about once a millisecond, creating a bead of lights. f4.5 gives the best sharpness for this camera, so I try to take every photo with this setting. In this case it gave the depth of field I needed too.
Vanity: To adjust the original I adjusted the saturation up to 1.10 to get richer colors. Highlights and Shadows were set to 11.0 and 16.9 respectively to tone down the sparkle of the sun and bring up the background. Finally the image was cropped from its original to 2502 x 1875 by excluding the left and bottom sides. This removed the distracting dead stalks and much of the image that lacked focus and detail.
Final image:
100% crop from the center:
f4.5 at 1/160s -0.3eV 56 mm (325 mm equivalent) 2816 x 2112 Canon S3
Essence: I took the original photo of water drops on blades of grass shown above in a flower bed at about 5:15 in the evening in California. With the sun shining from the left, there was a good amount of contrast and some interesting shadows. I used the S3's regular macro setting rather than the super macro, for two reasons. First, there was the water. The sprinkler head above and to the left precluded getting too close. Secondly, it allowed me to have a narrow field of view so I could leave out of the frame many of the surrounding plants. The setting of -0.3eV was to avoid blowing out the highlights on the drops too much.
Accident: As it turned out, the shutter speed was just the right length to see some interesting effects with the water. As the drops from the sprinkler emerge, they are often not spherical and they spin as they fly. The sun caught several of them as they tumbled about once a millisecond, creating a bead of lights. f4.5 gives the best sharpness for this camera, so I try to take every photo with this setting. In this case it gave the depth of field I needed too.
Vanity: To adjust the original I adjusted the saturation up to 1.10 to get richer colors. Highlights and Shadows were set to 11.0 and 16.9 respectively to tone down the sparkle of the sun and bring up the background. Finally the image was cropped from its original to 2502 x 1875 by excluding the left and bottom sides. This removed the distracting dead stalks and much of the image that lacked focus and detail.
Final image:
100% crop from the center:
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