Seeing the world upside down

Seeing the world upside down?

This picture was shot on the Holterberg (between Deventer and Enschede in Holland) during a nice walk in nature. We brought a crystal boll to do some experimental shooting. Funny thing is… you see the world upside down through the ball.

That morning started great! Great weather, great atmosphere, great company and a huge felling of “Let’s go and photograph!”. So we drove to the Holterberg in The Netherlands and brought a crystal boll with us that we just bought new. Just some nice time to experiment with it 🙂
One of the ideas was to put it on the ground and photograph the effect of it on the ground. In another instance we hold it in our hands and photographed through it. Why then holding it, when you can also have mother nature try and hold it for you. So I found these two branches in a tree and put the ball in between it. It showed the world, but upside down.

The shot was made out of the hand (no tripod used). At that moment, I was not shooting on manual yet and tried to control everything by setting the aperture and was fixated on the lowest aperture that I could get with a fixed ISO at 100. With and F-number of 1.40 (way too low), the camera decided to set the exposure to 1/4000th of a second. Low enough to elliminate any handshake in each photo. The lens was a fixed lens of 50 mm.

In post I turned the picture for the effect. I do that in Adobe Lightroom, in which I also tweaked with the shadows, just to show some more of the branches.
If I would make this picture again, I would have the F-value at about F9 to have more detail and sharpness in the photo. The speed would then probably still be good to handle it off-tripod.
So, the picture was made on the spot without a tripod, without any fancy settings and only with minimalist post processing. That made this shot a great impulsive photo!

Camera settings:

Location