A while ago, Scott came across a post on Strobist about capturing water droplets as they hit the water. The article also linked to a tutorial from Gavin Hoey on how to do it. It was an article that we both really wanted to try when we found some time. Well, that time was found today and we had an interesting time experimenting with the setup and capturing the shots you see below. We are really pleased with the results.
Our setup differed a little from the setup that Gavin describes in that we don’t have a wireless off-camera flash unit, so we just used a pc-pc cable to get our flash working off the camera. We straddled a step ladder over a small table and placed a baking tray (you can see the teflon texture in some images) filled with water on it. We suspended a bag filled with water from the ladder. I pricked a hole in the bag which allowed the water to drip in a constant stream into the same place. The camera was mounted on a tripod and focus was done manually by focusing on a pencil where the drops hit the water. We used our Canon 5D with 100mm F2.8 Macro lens at ISO 100, 1/200, F8. The flash was set to about 1/16 power when bouncing off the cards and full power when aimed through the cellophane.
Scott held the coloured cards at the end of the tray with the flash in his other hand and aimed it at different places on the card. He found a spot almost in line with the camera lens and water drop and aimed it slightly downward from fairly close to the base of the card. We tried a couple of different colours as you can see. The deep red and green images at the bottom were achieved by shooting through some coloured cellophane.
Here are the images. Enjoy!
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