Rubber Ducky Re-Do

Rubber Duck in Balloon

Never start a conversation with your husband with the sentence, “Tomorrow can you please lube up some rubber ducks for me and put them in balloons?” He will give you a very strange look then ask why. To which my response was, “so I can fill the balloons with water then drop them in the bathtub and take pictures of the resulting splash.”

Initial Burst (no rubber duck)

I took my lesson learned from the last I did the rubber duck drop photos and improved upon it. This time placed a splash screen in the bathroom to collect and drain the water back into the bathtub. The splash screen was a clear shower curtain hung slightly below the camera and a couple inches out from the bathtub with the bottom of the shower curtain in the bathtub. This work very well. There was no big mess in the bathroom and I did not have to wear a bathing suit since it contained all the water.

For this shoot the camera was mounted on a tripod looking down onto the drop zone. The camera was set at ISO 200, f11 and a shutter speed between 1/650s – 1/1000s and had a flash mounted on it. I also used a shutter release. I was going to use a flash mounted under the drop zone to light the water from bellow.

However, I cannot seem to get the trigger trap app to trigger the flash; I might need the new version for it to work properly. Thus I have a potential future project.

I got some decent results from this set up. Of course it needs to be refined further but for the equipment and space I have I feel I’m getting some interesting and decent photos.

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