To create this photograph, I squeezed an eyedropper into a pan of water, then manually snapped shots as the drops fell. The transparent water drop acted as a camera’s convex lens to form a real image and made the checkerboard background visible in the falling drop, only upside-down. The spherical water droplet refracted, or slowed down, the light. This change in the speed of light caused a change in the light’s direction as the light rays bent. As a result, the image of the checkerboard appeared distorted and inverted. In a sphere, the angle of incidence of the incoming light rays equals the angle of refraction for the exiting light rays, causing a greater distortion of the image around the edges of the water drop and no distortion in the center where the light rays pass straight through.

Other properties illustrated in this photograph are the properties of wave motion. When the drop landed in the water, it pushed other water molecules out of its way to form ripples that propagated outward. The speed of these waves can be found as the distance the wave traveled during a period of time. Similarly, the wave crests represent the highest points of the transverse wave which moves at right angles to its direction of motion. The disturbance across the surface of the water caught the light and checkerboard background, again refracting the light through the transparent medium to create interesting patterns.