Experiment time! What happens when you grab a grape vine tendril from the garden and try to turn it into a gnarled sculpture? This. It’s not perfect – no experiment is; but you know what experiments are? Fun!
We have some overgrown grape vines in our backyard, partly due to my lack of tending the gardens this year. My focus has been shipping books, prints, and getting things in order for our big move to Bulgaria. A gentle reminder that if you want a copy of my new book, the clock is ticking on placing an order:
skycrystals.ca/product/pre-order-macro-photography-the-un... - or get in touch if you’d like a print of any of my work! There is a bit of a backlog for prints as I’m still shipping images from my Kickstarter campaign, but I’ll make it work.
Anyhow, this image: the goal was to find a vine with character. A vine that wasn’t symmetrical or a spiral, something that made its own rules. I think this one tried to wrap around various blades of grass and ultimate failed, but it made for an interesting structure. Then, I started placing the water droplets.
Only a few at first, all placed with a hypodermic needle. Droplets stick very well to vine tendrils of a variety of plants, allowing me to add extra water to make some droplets bigger, or suck up droplets that form in the wrong location and find a better spot. There’s a lot of slight adaptation to the design, and you’re never completely satisfied with the results. The droplet on the right side in the middle, as an example, I now wish was larger.
I didn’t have the right flowers, another drawback. I could only find “mini” Gerbera Daisies for this shoot. I would have liked the black area in the droplets to be smaller, but that would require one of two things: the flower to be closer to the droplets (and thereby being more in focus in the background), or the flower to be physically larger in the same position. A distracting background would ruin the image, so I opted for a larger black border. This could have been solved by another process of shooting with a wider aperture, but then extensive focus stacking efforts would have been needed. Choices, choices!
Shot with a Lumix S1R and a Tamron 90mm F/2.8 macro lens. It was focus stacked, but only two shots required; the high-resolution mode was activated on the camera to allow for more extensive cropping, still yielding a very valuable image.
In the end, I like this image. It’s funky. It’s a little off-beat. It’s fun – and that was the entire purpose of the experiment.
