Check out other great images by © Brian Valentine on his website. This photographer has sooo many breathaking macro images (and he used to be a microbiologist).
Looking at his gallery makes me want to drop everything and go grab my camera and tripod!!!
How to Photograph Refracting Dew Droplets
Focus stacking is a very useful technique for increasing your depth of field while still maintaining an appealing level of background blur. The focus stacking tutorial creates a solid foundation for the technical aspect of stacking. Armed with this knowledge, we can explore a method to photograph flowers through refracted dew droplets.
Technique
Set your flash to E-TTL and Flash Exposure Compensation to its normal position (+1 FEC with the 430ex). The amount of reflections you will get in the drops vary a great deal, but they tend to be less with lighter colored flowers, presumably because lighter flowers take less flash power to properly expose.
Carefully set the mat down on the ground and kneel on it to spot an interesting dewdrop (preferably smaller than 2mm) or a group of dewdrops.
Carefully place the flower about 2cm behind the drop in a vertical position and then find the dewdrop in the viewfinder. (If you need to move the flower, remember: the refracted image is upside-down when viewed through the drop.)
Rest the camera on your hand as low to the ground as you can. Take several pictures while moving the camera forward ever so slightly until you have photographed the entire focus range containing all of the dewdrops themselves and their respective refracted images. Make sure you keep the FOV the same throughout all the shots and do not rotate the camera while taking the photos.
Below are the three pictures used to take a single composite photo. Notice how the focus is slightly different in each individual shot. One photograph has: the Side droplet refractions in sharp focus, one the Center droplet in sharp focus, one the Blades of grass in sharp focus
The completed focus stacked image below
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