Last time I talked about shooting natural water droplets on rainy days when the weather is not to your liking for landscape photography, and with this weekend being another wet and windy one I decided to take the topic indoors and do some experimentation with man made ones!
I know some people think this subject is somewhat cliched but I love it! Each image is unique in its own way and there are countless variations that can be tried for some amazing effects.
Rather than go for the usual clear water into a clear pool I wanted to try and get a CG or computer rendered effect with bright bold colors, so for the shoot I used natural blue and red food dye.
Capturing the water droplets is not as hard as you may think. I know that some posts on this say that you need to be prepared to take a couple of hundred shots but I found this not to be the case if you setup carefully. The most important things are using an external flash ( I use the Canon Speedlite 430), preferably off camera to control the direction of light, a reflector of some kind to stop under exposure and a macro or telephoto lens to allow you to fill the frame but stay a safe distance from water splashes.
After some experimentation I found the following setup works very well:
External flash - set this to manual mode and set the output to 1/32 or lower. This doesn't affect the amount of light from the flash but rather the flash duration and allows you to freeze the drops in motion.
Reflector - Use a reflector or white card placed opposite the flash. I found that not doing this resulted in vastly under exposed images.
Camera - set this to manual mode and a shutter speed of 180. this isn't too important as with these kind of shots the flash duration is now your effective shutter speed. For focusing, place a ruler where the drops will fall. Frame and focus on this.
Once everything is setup it is just a matter of releasing water drops and firing off shots at different times, before and after hitting the water.
Once you have your shots why not try black and white conversions like the shot above. More images are available in the Macro images gallery on the website.
If you want to see some really amazing liquid sculptures and get some inspiration check out Martin Waugh's site at http://www.liquidsculpture.com/.
Have fun!
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