Water droplets on spider web

When light passes from air into another medium such as water or glass, its path is bent slightly in a process called refraction. The amount to which light is bent, or refracted, depends partly on the angle at which the light strikes the surface and the ability of the medium to bend light, a characteristic known as its refractive index. This is the concept behind corrective lenses in spectacles and contact lenses, which are made from materials of a known refractive index and are shaped precisely to bend light by an exact amount, making up for a person’s inability to focus correctly on their own.

A water droplet can also act as a tiny lens, its strongly curved, almost spherical surface collecting light from a very wide angle behind the droplet and projecting it forward as a miniature image of the droplet’s background. For this photograph I placed a large daisy behind a spider web and used a fine mist spray bottle to gently saturate the web with hundreds of tiny water droplets. The effect is one of a myriad of tiny beads, each bead containing a perfect image of the daisy as a result of the refraction of light through the water droplets.