Natural N5

Peter Firus
Year 12 Swifts Creek Secondary College

Dew Drops on Spider’s Web acting as convex lenses.

Lenses either converge or diverge rays of light by refraction. Unlike concave lenses which can display a variety of images, a perfectly spherical convex lens has a very short focal length, and any object beyond this focal point will be seen inverted and have a greatly diminished magnitude (in front of the focal length the lens acts like a magnifying glass).
Water has a high surface tension which on the small scale causes water droplets to form into spheres. In this image, taken early in the morning in winter, dew droplets of various sizes have formed on a spider’s web providing convex lenses with which to see an inverted image of the scenery beyond the droplet. An interesting effect of the lens is that despite the background being extremely out of focus from the point of view of the camera lens, the background is still sharply visible through the dew drop.