In case readers haven’t noticed, some of our favorite and most essential websites are blacking out today in protest of the previously covered SOPA bill, with good reason. Under the guise of stopping pirating, SOPA has the potential to allow those with power to censor websites or have them removed entirely based on their own rationale. This not only means that freedom of speech on the internet could be curtailed by some very conservative hands, but that many of the websites we use everyday will be highly censored or cease to exist.That’s as good a reason as any to back away from the computer today and enjoy a bit of nature, but we’ll add a few more.

For inspiration, there’s no better place to look right now than the photography of Markus Reugels. The artist is known for working with a strange medium to create colorful and robust images: liquid. Usually what he captures is quite literally a colorful splash, capturing liquid in a single moment of movement like glass. Right now, however, he presents something a little new. Reugels has begun capturing worlds in a drop of water. As awesomely hyperbolic as that sounds, it’s true. Reugels has created single drops of water that capture Earth, Jupiter, the Moon, and more. Once again he uses extremely precise methods to photograph water in one moment--a perfect sphere of a droplet. Using bigger satellite photos as his backdrop and a high speed camera, Reugels captures the photo through the droplet so that each droplet looks like a crystal clear planet.

What Reugels creates is no easy feat, but he doesn’t take himself entirely too seriously. Along with his planets he’s captured the Bat-symbol and Spider-Man’s movie logo in some of his perfect little spheres. What he creates is deceptively simple and inspiring. It’s easy to want to capture a little bit of nature in motion after looking at his work. His photography makes people look differently at the icicles on trees or droplets of rain or dew in the spring and summer. If it’s possible at all to step away from the computer today, Reugels provides a little inspiration for what to do with your temporary freedom.

To see more, check out his Flickr page.