dpchallenge Archives — Island in the Net

Aperture—ƒ/8
Camera—NIKON D5100
Taken—30 July, 2017
Copyright—© 2017 Khürt L. Williams
Focal length—45mm
ISO—100
Shutter speed—1/160s

Last weekend I attended a macro photography workshop by Don Komerechka hosted by the Princeton Photography Workshop. It was a fun but challenging workshop and I learned just how much I have yet to learn. I am so far from where I want to be with macro but with patience and perseverance I think I can improve my craft. Water droplet macro — or in this case the term “micro” might be more appropriate — is much harder than any macro photography I have attempted so far. Macros of flowers or insects are all I have tried to date but even those seemed easy compared to the water droplets.

Satisfaction, Satisfaction NIKON D5100 18.0 55.0 mm f 3.5 5.6 20170730 4129 Edit

Water Droplet Macro

Aperture—ƒ/8
Camera—NIKON D5100
Taken—30 July, 2017
Copyright—© 2017 Khürt L. Williams
Focal length—45mm
ISO—100
Shutter speed—1/160s

Don gave the class a quick primer on focus stacking, a technique I have used a few times with my macro. One cool tip I learned is that Photoshop’s auto-align and auto-blend layers features makes it relatively easy to focus stack capture images.

Macro photography can be time consuming. Water droplet photography even more so. Getting the water droplets to be spherical to my satisfaction required a lot of trial and error. And I had a lot of failures. I deleted most of the images I captured that morning. The one included with this post is the best of them.

Satisfaction, Satisfaction DSC4140 Edit 2

Water Droplet Macro

Aperture—ƒ/8
Camera—NIKON D5100
Taken—30 July, 2017
Focal length—45mm
ISO—100
Shutter speed—1/160s

The featured image is a blend of several images. As you can see it’s flawed in many ways. It’s not sharp. The flower that was placed behind the dandelion doesn’t appear clearly.

I need more practice.

Each Wednesday, The Daily Prompt Photo Challenge provides a theme for creative inspiration. Participants take photographs based on their interpretation of the theme, and post them on their blog anytime before the following Wednesday.