making a splash

So the other day when I was doing the dishes I noticed the water dripping from my hands into the sink and it got me thinking about a few blogs (Digital Photography School & Strobist) I had read about snapping photos of water drops.

Well, I'm easily distracted, and it didn't take long till I had the camera, tripod, and a speedlight out. Then I was faced with the problem of getting water to drip slowly and regularly. A broom, a folding chair, and my belt got me started. Its a pretty comical arrangement, but photographers are interested in the photos, not the cheesy setup.

After a few test shots I got the focusing locked in, and started snapping away.

With something like this you take the shotgun approach, and just blast away, knowing that you'll get something cool eventually.

I did get some pretty good shots, but I was dissatisfied with the setup I was using. I had the water dripping into a small bowl, the one I normally eat cereal out of, and I didn't like that even though I was zoomed in as far as my lens would allow, the edges of the bowl were still in the frame.

So today I stopped into Home Depot and purchased a paint tray liner. At $1.67 I figured it was a cheap investment. Then down the street to the Buy More, I picked up some large sheets of multi-colored poster board.

I got home and set everything up again, but the first thing that happened--the tray liner was too big to fit in the sink, and was too weak to support its own weight when filled with water. Well that was nuts, because I was hoping to exploit its' white color with food coloring, or colored lights.

I found a big stock pot and that worked! Anyway, here are some of today's results:

and then I added the poster board.

You can see it added some dramatic coloring!

then I got fancy and put two different sheets side by side:

So now you're wondering how this all works? Well, there are two ways you could do it.

The first would be to have a really, really bright room, like a green house, or just outside on a bright day. Then you could take pictures with a really fast shutter, and capture that 1/1000th of a second when the water splashes. It is hard to take the sink outside though, and removes a lot of the creativity you can explore.

Or you could use a flash.
Think of the last time you were out dancing and they had a strobe light on. Everyone started moving in those weird, jerky steps, like they were in a flip book or something. I'm doing the same thing here. One, brief pulse of light "freezes" everything. For these I'm using a Nikon SB600 on a short cord to get the flash off camera and pointing at the background. The light bounces off the background, and that is what colors everything. I keep the room pretty dark, and I have the flash dialed down to its lowest settings: 1/64 or 1/32, which provides the shortest light pulse I can get. I had to bump up the power a little to deal with a relatively small aperture (f 16 I think) so that I could increase the depth of field.

You can see the water drops of others on flickr (some great ones are BrettMorrison, SteveP!, and drippy2009) or by googling: strobist water drop.

Also drippy2009 has a blog, that is doing stuff that makes my pictures here look like a kindergartner's finger paintings. He has drips colliding in mid air, crown splashes with red, white and blue in the same splash, and a Geisha captured perfectly in a falling droplet of water. Simply amazing! He lays out how he has done everything, and I think I will try some of his techniques. If they work I'll post the results here later.