Water Droplet Refraction

[Wendy Kates]

I'm teaching myself refraction photography...there is quite a learning curve! I got inspired one evening after work, so I photographed this in the waning summer evening light...hence the high ISO and relatively slow shutter speed. I think I'll save my next attempts for weekend days! I also have to figure out the best angle and the optimal distance between droplet and flower, to maximize the chance of getting the entire flower in the droplet. But it's not bad for a start, I think.

Canon 7DII
100mm macro lens
ISO 640
f/2/8
1/60s
After tweaking and reducing noise in LR, six images were imported into Photoshop, and stacked and blended. Nik CEP was used to enhance the colors.

Comments / critiques welcome.

[Ron Conlon]

Great to see a fresh approach in this forum. Thanks for sharing this. My first impression was super positive, but more looking was rewarded and I liked it more as I looked, and I like that it did that to my perception. I assume the orientation shown is the way you shot it. Despite that, I might consider rotating it 90 degrees--while the purists for physical reality might find drops on the side of a vertical stem unilikely, it seems reasonable that they would look realistic. Rotating 90 degrees would remove the inconcruity of a horizontal stem. Ideally, it would be a diagonal to add compositional interest.
I love the little lenses of droplets and that they give different views of the background flower.
There is banding on my monitor of the background flower, and you might try retouching in the frontmost-focused frame in that region to smooth it out to give you nice bokeh. I think it is an artifact of the stacking software, most struggle to make something in focus of stuff we intended to make out of focus, so you need to help it out.
I might try increasing the saturation of the background flower, but I am not sure that this will result in an improvement, but it might be worth a try.
Despite my extensive critique, I like it a lot.

[John Robinson]

Certainly is good for a start as you say Wendy,! Like Ron I came back to this a time or two and it gets better. Good to have fresh ideas I agree
(I can never think of any- must try more !!) We all have our styles which I think is good.
Cheers
John

[Jonathan Ashton]

Good start Wendy, I have been trying this for a couple of years and been totally unsuccessful. I am looking forward to more and you have rekindled my interest in this style. I tried with with ants, maybe flowers would be better.
Ron offers good advice there is little I could add, maybe if practicable go for a smaller aperture, I suspect you could make a set up for indoors in order to optimise ISO etc.

[Wendy Kates]

Thanks, all, for your helpful input. I'll keep working on this!

[Daniel Cadieux]

I really like the idea (I actually tried this last month on a tulip in my garden). I like the trio of daisies in their respective drops. If anything I would have composed in-camera in a way to position the stem diagonally rather than horizontally.

[Wendy Kates]

Thanks, Daniel. I agree with you about the diagonal composition...I'll try that next time.