bronze award to 
Hi Cosmix, I thought this would get a much higher mark due to the technical difficulty but obviously not everyone votes according to technical difficulty. It seems copy and paste work beats technical difficulty for some strange reason. It's unjust but there's not much we can do about it.
gold award to 
Thank you for your reply. I was so curious about the effect, I asked Google and discovered it is all about surface tension. Where an object touches the water, the water is obviously depressed in that area and causes round shadows due to the depressed water. The back of the leaf is obviously touching the water differently in different areas and causing bulbous shadows where it is depressing the water the most.
Here is another example ... http://thumbpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cool-spider-water-floating-tension1.jpg.
It has made me want to try to effect myself so I can hardly wait for a nice sunny day. Thank you for the inspiration and your very unique creative work. It gives the illusion of a composite but I now believe it is not. I apologise for my skeptism.
Can you please explain how the shadow of a leaf with smooth edges ends up having frilled edges? The shadow looks like it is a shadow from a different leaf.
Macro photography is a challenge even for the best photographers. The following site might be very helpful to you when it comes to focusing on small objects. When you don't have a moving subject, you can take a series of shots with your camera on manual focus while you move closer to the subject and you will end up with different areas in focus so you could pick the best out of them or focus stack them for a greater DOF.
https://photographylife.com/how-to-focus-in-macro-photography
https://www.naturettl.com/how-to-focus-stack-macro-photos-in-the-field/#:~:text=How%20Do%20You%20Focus%20Stack,little%20wider%20to%20about%20f5.
This is an interesting entry and the leaf pattern looks great with the water on it. It looks like it is floating in a yellow bowl and the shadowed areas look orange but I am most curious as to how you achieved that background effect which makes the glowing shadow of the floating leaf look vastly different to the actual leaf. Is it a composite of two different photos which has been photoshopped into one?
Scaling up the source jpeg has caused a lot of pixelization. To scale up a jpeg, it is best to first turn it into a vector. Then you won't get that pixelization.
Rubber Ray kindly made a tutorial on how to edit entries and it is very helpful if you are interested.
https://mega.nz/file/NbJ3UaiA#4_3jnO0JiaW8rZZ-6BdsRFFRxdiOO-A2aYU2YahVePY
The pattern is interesting but its a shame its not in focus.
The archway created from the source is a unique idea and the animals are really cute but the cutting out of the flowers could be a bit better. I can still see parts of the original backgrounds around the flowers.
A creative use of filters and effects. Nicely done.
The added ants are missing parts of their legs. It also looks wrong to have food in focus carried by silhouetted ants. The food they are carrying should also be silhouetted.
The birds are cute and the fence is good but the depth of field in the background is wrong. The focal point on the ground does not match the focal point of the birds and fence.
