I woke up this morning groggy, only to hear my wife Donna following me around, saying, “There are drops on the trees! Drops on the trees!”
Yes, yes, I said to myself; there are often drops on the trees and we can all have days where we let the drops be the drops and the warm inside of the house be the warm inside of the house all around us.
So I made coffee. I had a nice slice of blueberry bread. And I looked out the kitchen window, and…there were drops on the trees. Millions, billions, untold uncountable scazillions of drops on the tress, the bushes, the everywhere was bedazzled.
Which is odd, so I went out on the back deck in my bare feet and nearly fell as I skidded on the ice.
Ice.
I looked closely at the drops: lovely, frozen drops of dew hanging from the trees.
I hauled out the tripod, the special rail for doing focus stacking, I plugged into the tail end of the (still out on the back deck railing) Christmas lights for power (necessary), and set up a 100-image sequence, half a millimeter of movement between exposures to increase the (tiny, tiny, oh-so-tiny) depth of field enough to get some real magic out of this magic.
An hour later, after much grousing about how long it took to combine 100 images, the picture above. A jungle of light, the sun just cresting the far trees: diamonds in the Japanese Maple tree.