Maple sap drip catches sunlight

Liquid Sunlight Sun Flare

Maple sap in the spring really is liquid sunlight. In the spring, the sap contains a relatively high concentration of sugar. Sugar is the final product of the photosynthesis reaction. It was made last year, and stored for use in the spring to bring the tree out of dormancy.

Maple sap drip catches sunlight

Maple sap drip catches sunlight

The tiny sun flare on the falling drop of maple sap in this picture is straight out of camera or SOOC. It was not added. The flare was a pleasant surprise. I was taking pictures of sap falling from a freshly-tapped maple tree. For just a short time, the sun came out. When I got back to the (cough) studio (you might call it a living room couch), I discovered one of the pictures happened to pick up the sun. It looks like a diamond dropping into the bucket. The featured image is a crop; the original in camera is to the right.

This image and its crop also demonstrate the virtues of lots of light. I was shooting at 3200 ISO and f/36 for maximum depth of field so that any drops would be in focus. The sun was not out at first, either, further necessitating the higher ISO. With the sun out, the exposure was 1/1600 sec. With plenty of light, there is very little visible grain at sizes that fit on a computer screen. Moreover, the high aperture and sunlight turned out to be serendipitous because the tiny aperture gave us great sun flare. I wasn’t going for sun flare. In fact I’ve never intentionally used the small-aperture technique that way before, though I realized what had happened after seeing the picture.

This photograph was taken with a Nikon D90 and a Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 AF. I have done very little post-processing, just brightening the image a little.