Autumn Dewdrops

This autumn we've had quite a few misty mornings which have resulted in cobwebs festooned with dewdrops throughout my garden. On closer inspection I noticed that each dewdrop was showing an inverted image of my garden so, once the sun had burned through a little, I decided to try to photograph these.

The immediate problem was that the most attractive cobwebs (and those with some distance behind them to help with the background of the images) were in parts of my garden that were not accessible with a tripod. So I had little option but to shoot handheld and to use my 60mm macro lens rather than the 150mm. The breeze that was gently moving each cobweb meant that it would be impossible to use a slow shutter speed anyway, so there seemed little to lose. In these sort of images, the challenge is to get each dewdrop in the frame to be in focus which can be very difficult at this level of magnification, especially when the web is moving in the breeze. Anyway, the image below was probably the best higher magnification image that I managed.

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and here's one at a lower level of magnification: