I wanted to experiment with water drop images for a while and this past week-end I, along with photographer friend, Keith Misegades, decided to spend some time seeing what we could do. You can view more of the results at www.blackburnimages.com/albums.aspx.
The set up is pretty simple. Rather than replicate a bunch of information here, just check out the links below. Flickr also has a pretty large amount of images and information on the subject. I used a Nikon D300 with 70-200mm f2.8 lens with 20mm extension tube. My flash was a Nikon Speedlight SB800 that I triggered remotely with Paul Buff’s CyberSync transmitter/receiver. A sturdy tripod and a remote shutter release are vital for sharp images.
The basic idea is to let the flash be the shutter for the image. Setting the flash at a low power setting (in manual mode) will yield an extremely fast burst of light. With low ambient light not affecting the exposure it is pretty easy to capture the image. The trick, in our low tech set up, was to figure out the best time to trip the shutter and flash. You could get pretty elaborate with some sort of triggering device for the flash/camera, but I relied on the old “take a lot and I’m bound to get one or two decent ones” approach. I used a variety of colored gels, hand held in front of the flash, to experiment with colors. For all the images I used clear water except for a set when I dyed the water with red food coloring.
We tried capturing images with the flash in "stroboscopic" mode, but never could get the exposure and timing correct. That will take some more study and practice!
It was fun in the post-processing (Lightroom v3) to adjust the temperature and hue/staturation/luminance settings to get some of the dramatic effects.
I think my next attempts will be to try different liquids and to see if I can capture the “crashing” drops image.
Useful links:
http://www.amateursnapper.com/blog/post/photographing-water-drops
http://www.hypergurl.com/blog/photography/water-droplets-splashes.html
http://egablog.com/2010/01/how-to-photograph-a-splash-of-water-week-52/
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