Explore Photography

It seemed like everywhere I looked last week there was an article on photographing a water drop. I am sure you’ve seen the pictures I am referring to. They have always intrigued me. Drops of water or colored liquid photographed at the point of impact, or just after it. These splashes create shapes for a split second that resemble crowns or upside down bowls in a countless variety.

I’ve always thought there had to be some kind of trick or high tech gear to accomplish these images. Then I came across this article on The Strobist blog: How to Photograph Water Drops. After reading that article I had to give it a shot. Here is one of my images:

Photograph of a Water Drop with one "off camera" flash.

It wasn’t difficult to set up and start getting some very interesting images. However it did take some patience and a lot of compact flash card space!

Step one was to find a suitable pan or tray to catch the water drops in. All I had access to were some old scratched up cookie sheets.  So, I grabbed the darkest one I could find and set it on the edge of my dinning room table.

I then set up a 20 x 30 sheet of white foam core at the back of the pan to bounce my Vivitar 285 flash off of which was set up to the left of the pan on the table. Pointing the Vivitar 285 flash at the foam core and not the water, lighting the water drops from behind.

The flash was set to 1/16th power on manual. This will give you the shortest flash duration and the quickest recycle time.

A plastic Ziplock bag was half way filled with water and suspended from a background stand I set up over the cookie pan. I used a stick pin to poke a hole in the water bag and start the water dripping into the pan.

My camera was mounted onto a tripod and placed very close to where the water was hitting the pan, less than a foot! To focus, I put the lens on Manual focus and stood up a needle for pumping air into footballs in the pan where the water drops were hitting. Once I focused on the air needle I removed it and shot an image at f8 to check my exposure. The resulting exposure was good. I set my camera to record RAW images so I could play around with the color temp later.

So I started shooting………as fast as the flash could recycle. After shooting quite a few shots I previewed what I had on the camera. Most of the shots were boring but a couple looked great. I wanted to check the depth of field so I zoomed in on one of the shots that looked like a crown. Only half of the shape was in focus, bummer!

I kicked up the flash to 1/4 power and stopped the lens down to get more DOF, refocused and shot away. I got some pretty amazing images but it took many clicks of the camera to hit one every now and then.

The photograph I included above is one I liked but I do not like the scratches in the pan that show up in the image. The blue color comes from setting the color temp to 2500°k.

I liked the overall image but again, I did not like the scratches. Hey, maybe if I make the picture black and white and increase the contrast a bit the scratches will ‘work’ in the image better. The black and white is below….tell me what you think.

Black and White version of a water drop photograph

I like this one better.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 9:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.