DANA MURRAY

ARTIST STATEMENT

A Watery World

Persistence, patience, and creativity.  These are the qualities I practice most often with water drop photography.  Photographing water drops is very challenging, but rewarding, because I am capturing something that happens too fast for our naked eye to see.  There is delicate beauty…and elements of surprise in each tiny, amazing water drop, that we can't see…but the camera captures it.  A perfect moment, frozen in time, to enjoy later.                                                                                                                                     

About the process:

The background and the drop are always one photo, not two photos combined.  This works in my favor, because the colors in the ripples will always perfectly match the background in the photo. Very minimal work is done in the digital darkroom (such as Photoshop).  I use a fast flash  to capture the motion of the drop, and spend a minimum of 4-6 hours in a photo shoot, taking several hundred photos.  Of those I will set aside a handful of favorites.  I may print one or none, or I may print a few. This is a slow process, as I get only one photo per drop; the camera’s “fps” (frames per second) isn’t fast enough to catch more than one drop falling at a time!

Rain, ocean, drinking water--all waters have unique nuances.  I do minimal work in Photoshop, as I wish to show the true personality of the drop and not manipulate the shape of the drop.  I love showing a relationship and similarity between the drop shape and the landscape, or background of the picture. Many of my photos are collisions, which is when drops collide on top of a drop (usually as the first drop is rebounding upwards into a column shape). Water drops often react in ways I'm not expecting. Often I will get just the drop that I need, exactly when I need it, then never see it again. It is an amazing and complex subject to photograph.

Dana Murray’s self taught specialty is water drop photography, which she has been doing since 2008. She also likes to photograph landscapes, macros, and vintage cars.  She currently shoots with a Canon 5D Mark III  and various lenses.