Photography using cristal ball, why not?

As most of y'all know I traveled to Canada last summer and there's one thing I didn't tell you all the details about. This trip was mostly about nature and photography, so learning something knew is always a good thing. To make it more interesting I carried a eleven cm cristal ball with me as an extra objective to shoot at. I've seen some photo's in magazines and even on Steemit before I took off to Canada, it had my interest immediately.

My first try was at the famous Lake Louise.

For the thumbnail I'll show you an example first.

For this post I show the RAW photo's which @guchtere will mock me for I'm sure, but I want to tell and show you how difficult it is. Below you see the scenery as it is. Lots of light and unfortunately lots of people as well. This was one of the reasons I didn't want to zoom a lot, you'd see everybody walking along the water. When you're looking for a pose try to think what you want to see in your ball. The diafragma (opening of the lens) is important. With a high number F32, more on the photo is sharp. With a low number F1.4 only the AF focus spot is sharp and anything around it isn't. Unfortunately it also let in light. So I couldn't go to low with my F number otherwise the photo was one light bulb.

For the first photo above I tried to capture the glacier in the ball, but it is super hard to focus. That's why the second photo is a lot closer to the ball. Now as you can probably tell, everything in the ball is upside down. This gives it a nice effect. Though, I wasn't happy with the holder the ball was resting at. The brown color was to distracting for the rest of the photo.

So for the third photo I asked my gf to hold the ball. We had to do this quickly because we forgot about the sun and the magnifying effect of the glass ball. Withing seconds a pinpoint of sunbeams focussed on her hand which burned her skin a little. Luckily she didn't threw away the glass ball. So anyhow, after burning my gf for a tiny bit I turned the photo to see the effect in the ball the correct way. The blurry background isn't a distraction at all. What do you think?

Glacier road

The second spot was beside a lake that was perfectly still. Not a gust of wind and the hill on the other side was a nice view to capture in the ball. I'm curious which photo you like the most. Please tell me in the comments which one you prefer the most. Or maybe you don't like both of them, feel free to tell me as well.

Takakkaw Falls, Yoho National Park

For the last spot I had troubles with the fog coming of the waterfall. We didn't have a lot of time to take photo's. I try to stick to one rule, always enjoy nature by looking threw your eyes at least as much as threw your camera. The different thing I did this time is turning the whole photo again, but this time the background is clearly visible. A waterfall upside down is strange, yet interesting.

Remember the last photo, because this one will come back later in one of my next posts. I liked this one so much that I came with an idea to do something else with this photo as well. As you might see, this last photo is also adjusted with Lightroom. I had to do this to turn the photo upside down and I couldn't resist to swipe the contrast a little. Now the ball really jumps out of my screen and the waterfall looks more clear on the dark rock formation.
I hope you like my first experience with the glass ball as well as I did. It takes some effort to get the hang of it, but I think it is all worth it. Any ideas where I can use this ball besides water?

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All photo's are taken by me with the Nikon D90.
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