Water drops

[thkn777]

@mtngal

We had a quick but hefty rain shower and I used the very last rays of evening sun to test that pole idea - grabbed a spade and pushed my luck with ISO800, f/11-f/16 and shutter speed 1/30..1/100s. Not much luck... a bit better than I thought and there wasn't really heavy wind so I know that this is a good idea and will try to practise this with shutter speeds around 1/100..1/200s. Lens used was a K 135/2.5 on the Vivitar 2x macro focussing teleconverter - giving a whooping 270mm macro feeling :G

One of the lucky shots:



I think with some practise this can really turn out great, also for small insects and stuff, I'll post the first tests in the close-up section. Thanks again for the hint!

@Dawg

hehe... ok, I'll see what I can do. It's not for the impatient - be warned. Stay tuned, I'll probably post this in the approriate section and announce here in the pentax section.

Best regards,
Th.

[mtngal]

That's a lovely one! Well done - it does take some practice and it's sometimes awkward for me with my small hands to juggle everything. But it does help. Keep it up, I love the last one.

[Torgny]

Great pictures, fast learning curve. Can learn from you people. What do you think about this very heavily cropped picture?

/T

[Torgny]

It is crop from this file, which in it's turn is a crop... and so on

[mtngal]

It's an interesting picture - I really like it, but I can't quite figure it out. Are the drops on the leaf or suspended on something just above it's surface? The drops are very sharp, but the leaf isn't - I wouldn't have expected quite so much difference in focus, even with such a small DOF as you get with macro. What lens/combination did you use? Tell all!

[Torgny]

mtngal wrote:

It's an interesting picture - I really like it, but I can't quite figure it out. Are the drops on the leaf or suspended on something just above it's surface? The drops are very sharp, but the leaf isn't - I wouldn't have expected quite so much difference in focus, even with such a small DOF as you get with macro. What lens/combination did you use? Tell all!

The picture is taken with a Fujifilm Finepix f31fd. The plant's leaves serve as a water collector during the night and early morning.

It is a crop from a .jpg like the one below

My main interest is to take pictures of rain. Drops are quite effective in doing so but hard to "catch"

I was invited here from the close up section. Perhaps I can invite you and hear your comment on the pictures thread
Rain
Drops

I will look at more water drops in your section

Torgny

[mtngal]

Ah, you are challenging me to think about this. The funny thing is that I don't think I'm an expert in rain drops, and I'm really not sure what I've done specifically to get good shots. I really don't know if there is any "magic formula" to taking pictures of raindrops, but here's what I've done - I use a macro lens that's a manual focus one and capable of 1:1.Is your fixed lens camera capable of that? Some are close. Are you using something like an add-onmacro TC, which might help you get closer.

Best to have a tripod, but I don't have one that will work. I use the pole as I described above in this thread - it's not as good as a tripod, but it's better than nothing (hint - try to put the pole at an angle and lean into it, it sometimes provides additional stability over just using it as a third leg).

Use as small an aperture as you can afford and still keep the shutter speed fast enough to avoid camera shake. Shutter speed isn't important if you use a tripod. I think I try to use at least f11, or f16 for these shots (my lens is quite sharp at these apertures).

I've had mixed success with using the on-board flash. It's very easy to get distracting hot spots and hard to figure out how not to get them. The picture that's been the best received so far was taken with the on-board flash, and I have no idea why it was so successful or what settings I might have used (suspect I had the flash set at a -Ev). It's much easier to use an off-camera flash, especially one that can operate wirelessly with the on-board flash. I don't think any of the fixed lens cameras have that capability, and as far as Pentax cameras go, the first one to have this capability was the K10.

Only other thing I can add is that it takes practice. There's probably techniques that go into this that I'm not even aware of, but this is about all I think about - aperture, shutter speed and lighting, and how to get the optimum of each.