I had a brilliant idea to use dinoflagellates (bioluminescent plankton) for water droplet photography. The dinoflagellates glow when stimulated (i.e. shaken, dropped, impact each other), so I figured they could be used for a unique water drop photo. However, there was a problem, while I could see the glow of the dinoflagellates; the camera senor even when cranked up to ISO 6400 could not detect the glow at a useful shutter speed to freeze the water drop. Usually when I do water drop photography, I am somewhere between ISO 100 – 400 with an aperture of F4 - F8 and shutter speed of 1/250 or faster. When using the dinoflagellates I was at ISO 1000 – 3200, with an aperture of F2.8 and a shutter speed of 5 seconds or slower just capture the light the dinoflagellates produced. Thus, I could not freeze any drops, and the resulting pictures look more like blurry atomic partial traces or abstract art. Below are a few of the better images after they were edit...
Photography and Travel