Sparkles

Where did the concept of sparkles come from?

This is something I have often wondered. Was it the reflection of the waves as the sun rises and sets? Was it small pieces of metalic rocks and gems that shone in the light that caught our eye?

Or perhaps, it was a more common occurrence across all lands, oceans and nations. How water droplets catch the sunlight after rain. Much akin to the rainbow.

When packing up to go on a camping trip after a night of rain, I decided to take the macro out and take some photos of water droplets on the  magnolia out the front of our house.

I tried two things - first, I tried to take a photo of a leaf through a water droplet. This didn't appear to be working at all, when I noticed the early morning sunlight catching on the side of the droplet. I wonder if I can flare that, I thought?

I made the aperture small and the shutter as slow as I could - in this case only 100mm as I was hand holding my camera. The small opening allows less light through, while the slow shutter captures the movement of the light.

It took a lot of experimenting but I finally caught. And caught it in focus none-the-less! What was really cool however, was that while viewing on my laptop, I noticed a leaf was visible in the droplet! Love it when that happens!

Finally, what I love about these photos is that they are unedited. These are as taken. The lesson? I should make the most of early morning light more often!

What was cooler again about this, was that I was able to capture the sparkle in not one but three different colours! How amazing is light? While looking through the camera, the light bouncing into my lens was whole and therefore, white as above. But at other times it was broken, so that it became blue, green, orange and red.

Again, none of these are post-edited.

I would just like to once again marvel at how light works, how it has been created to create all colours imaginable. You cannot imagine a new colour, it's all there in the light, waiting to be reflected, refracted and absorbed to bounce back to provide a huge gamut of colour that is amazing. No camera could capture that.