Some harmless experimentation ........

Or how to while away a drab Sunday afternoon. As the weather necessitated another indoor blip I thought I would experiment a little more with glycerine droplets on a glass sheet. I wanted to show how the convex lens of the droplet affected the image and wondered if a grid would best illustrate this. I did not have any graph paper but suddenly remembered the grid of the curves adjustment in Photoshop. Of all Photoshop's box of tricks this is by far my favourite as it is the most powerful of the photoshop tools, allowing both great subtlety and radical modification.

In order to photograph it, I looked into my Photoshop guidance books to find a good illustration. I then placed my thick piece of glass on top of the page and focussed down on it, experimenting with the placement of the light (a strip of LED lights).

As the the globule leaves a shadow at the base of the glass I found the best place to have the illumination was directly overhead. Otherwise the placement of the globule and its shadow differed markedly and it looked as though there were four globules. Even with it overhead there is slight displacement between the glycerine droplet and the shadow. You can best trace the outline of the globule by looking at the slightly magnified and bent bits of the grid lines. Which, of course, is why I wanted to experiment with droplets to see the way in which they alter the reality through refraction.

Not a particularly inspiring image to look at but it does illustrate the properties of refraction through liquid droplets and allow me to introduce to you my favourite photoshop tool.