Liquid Pearls
Apr, 2015Views
717
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Awards
Chatter Award
Top Shot Award 21
Winner in Spider web Photo Challenge
Fall Award 2020
Superb Composition
Absolute Masterpiece
Top Choice
Outstanding Creativity
Peer Award
Superior Skill
Magnificent Capture
Virtuoso
All Star
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken on a farm at Storm King Dame near Stanthorpe in Queensland. There were hundreds of spiderwebs on the barbed wire fences, threes, branches, etc.Time
I'd gone there to shoot the sunrise over the dam on what turned out to be a very foggy morning, so it was very early in the morning, but the web was captured after sunrise when the light was stronger.Lighting
The fog created amazing lighting conditions as the sun rose, especially on the spiderwebs which were soaked with dew drops.Equipment
Canon 70D with a 18-135mm lens fitted with a 30mm extension tube and mounted on a tripod.Inspiration
Just the way the light was glittering off the dew drops - they looked like pearls ... Hence the image title "Liquid Pearls".Editing
Camera Raw, Photoshop CS6 and Nik Silver Efex Pro. The image came out of the camera almost as a monochrome even though it was shot in colour. I didn't like the bluish cast (probably caused by the white balance being set on Daylight but fixed in Camera Raw). I converted the image to black and white using Silver Efex. Apart from that, I did Levels adjustments and applied a bit of sharpening. There was no need to crop as I'd composed the image in camera and was happy with that. This is one of my favourite macro shots.In my camera bag
Canon 70D body, Canon 10-18mm ultra wide angle, Canon 18-135mm walk around lens, Tamron 28-300 telephoto zoom, set of 3 Kenko extension tubes, a set of Cokin P Series Grad ND filters (2, 4, 8) plus a Cokin P Series solid ND 8 filter, a Hoya CPL filter and a B+W 10-stop ND filter, a LensPen cleaning set and a Giotto Rocket blower for keeping my gear clean, a Remote shutter release, torch and spare microfibres cloths, a Trekking camera harness (love this bit of gear - am lost without it) and a Aquatech rain cover. All my lenses have lens hoods. I don't use UV filters unless the weather is inclement or I'm shooting in a wet location or a coastal location with lots of salt spray. Carbon fibre Zomei travel tripod.Feedback
An awareness of light is really important - you have to "see" this sort of shot. The tripod was really important - low light and using extension tubes (which have very fine focusing tolerances) made it impossible to capture the shot hand held, and I didn't want to increase the ISO from 100 as any grain would have been intensified by using the extension tubes. The shallow depth of field created by using the extension tube made the point of focus critical - I used spot focus and picked my focus point carefully by taking several shots with slightly different focus points until I found the one I was happy with. I shot this on Av as having control over depth of field was very important; shutter speed wasn't. White balance was set on Daylight, which could have accounted for the bluish cast - I played around with this in post and ended up getting a better result with Auto!
