The weather outside these days just sucks and Southern Ontario winters are fantastically boring.  One is festooned with dull flat skies, damp chilly cold, darkness after 5:30 PM, the flat uninspired lay of the land in suburbia and no money or vacation time left to seek out warmer and more photogenic venues.  I’m a person who loves summer and detests winter, yet I live in Canada…go figure.  It’s a time of year where I tend to spend my time indoors and look for ways to keep myself occupied.

Last weekend, I setup a cheesy macro experiment.  I wanted to try my hand at using water drops to act as lenses.  First, I tried to capture water drops falling in front of an image of the Orion Nebula to see if that would work.  My hasty setup did not achieve what I wanted, the drops are too hard to capture in flight without some elaborate setup .  However, the jerry rigged water dropper I made out of a pierced sandwich bag produced a nifty photo.

Here’s one for the wall of shame.  If you look closely, you’ll see the Orion Nebula in the drop.  This is as good as I got it.

This photo is the one I thought was cool.  It looks like some new kind of translucent life form with DNA strands floating around inside its body.  It was accidental that I got this effect, but it made the above failure worth it.

My other experiment used some water droplets hanging from a rose bush twig I rescued from under two feet of snow.  I used a picture of the moon I took with my telescope to provide the subject for the water drop lens.   Again, it’s a bit cheesy.  However, I wanted to learn this technique so I can apply it someday to make better water drop images after a rain storm.   There are some really good examples of this type of photography on the internet, but it takes lots of practice to get it right.  This is my first attempt.

Mission accomplished: I staved off another day of boring cabin fever.

All photos were taken with a Pentax K-5, FA-100mm Macro Lens and two flashes.