Skip to main content

Water Drops

I like doing water drop photos for four reasons: 1) it looks deceptively simple, 2) the challenge in capturing the moment of impact, 3) the surprising images you can capture, and 4) the fact there is no right way to do it.  For my most recent attempt at water drop photography, I light the drop from below, so the light would come up through the water.  This is different compared to other water drop photos where they light from the side or from above.  I feel lighting the drops from below give them more of a liquid glass appearance and an inner glow.

Surprisingly, the set up for these photos was relatively simple.  I used the following items:
  •         large edged baking sheet (to catch any overflow),
  •         a bowl (to protect the flash equipment),
  •         a flash with radio trigger,
  •         an upside down aquarium (water drop platform),
  •         backdrop stand (to hang water bag from),
  •         Ziploc sandwich bag,
  •     paper towels,
  •         tape (to attach the bag to the stand),
  •         food coloring,
  •     tinfoil backdrop (reflects light),
  •         a pin (to puncture the water bag), 
  •         tripod,
  •         camera with a 60mm macro lens,
  •         remote trigger, and
  •         water.   

I placed the flash equipment inside a bowl on the baking sheet, and covered it with an upside down aquarium.  I then dropped water onto the what was the bottom of the aquarium as the flash lit the surface from below (see photo of set up).  

Set up
Set up

To make this work I used radio-triggered flashes, in high-speed sync mode, so I could go over the native flash speed sync of 1/250s.  For most of these photos, I was using a shutter speed between at 1/800s and 1/1200s with an aperture of F8 to F16 at ISO 400 with a flash power of 1/32 to 1/64. I found if I went to high in the flash power it would blow out areas of the water drop.  I used the smaller aperture to increase my depth of field, so more of the image would be in focus and allow for variation of drop placement.  I pre-focused the camera using a pinhead, and then locked the focus so it would be consist throughout the photos, since it is difficult to focus on a falling water drop.  I had my camera set to high-speed mode and used a remote trigger. I used high-speed so I could get the maximum frame rate, thus increasing my chances of capturing the drop.  However, this technique also increased my number of blank photos.  Now I did this twice, the first time I took around 512 photos and kept 44, which is an 8-percent success rate, and the second time I took 623 photos and kept 30, which is about a 5-percent success rate.  It should be noted while I kept 44 photos from the first session, I think about 10 are presentable, because I did not uses a remote trigger and you can see camera shake and the glass was not clean so there were speckles in the photos.  Thus, the success rate of the firs try is closer to 2-percent.

As you can see in the examples of the first attempt, the water drops are not perfectly crisp and there are some dust specks on the water surface.  
ISO 800, Aperture F8, Shutter Speed 1/320s
ISO 800, Aperture F8, Shutter Speed 1/320s
ISO 400, Aperture F8, Shutter Speed 1/320s

For the second attempt, I did several photos with just the flash lighting from below, but added a diffuser to the flash to reduce blown out areas in the water drop.  I also decided to add a second hand held flash with a radio trigger to light the drops from the side; however, this removed the nice dark surface I was getting and exposed the flash underneath the drop.  
ISO 400, Aperture F16, Shutter Speed 1/1250s
ISO 400, Aperture F16, Shutter Speed 1/1250s
ISO 400, Aperture F9, Shutter Speed 1/1000s, also side lit
ISO 400, Aperture F9, Shutter Speed 1/1000s, also side lit
Overall, I like how the lighting worked, but am happier with the second set of images as compared to the first.  You can see all my variation on the water drop photo here. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2025

This year felt a little off for me; I think it was because I was in a mental recovery mode.  I finished my graduate program in June and immediately went on a week-long vacation to Palm Springs.  I do not recommend Palm Springs in June; way too hot.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the graduate program mentally and physically exhausted me, which I think showed in some of my creative work.  But being able to work with great people like Natalie Hanrion , Coralinx Cosplay , and Anastasia B kept me motivated.  While I didn’t attend as many Cosplay Photo Shoot events as in the past, the ones I did attend were helpful in keeping the creativity flowing.  I also took some time this year to reflect on a few things and will be making some changes for 2025. In 2024, I shot 6241 frames, which is a 30-percent decrease from last year.  I edited 3187 frames, which is a 40-percent decrease from 2023.  I think this year, I started focusing on being very min...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Session of 2025 - Queen of Hearts

My first official shoot of 2025 was with Lady Cels on January 4 th , to shoot her Queen of Hearts cosplay based off the NoFlutter Design. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 1 FJ400 Westcott Strobes 60-inch umbrella with sock 1 rectangular soft box 1 bell reflector grids 2 C-stands 1 Platypod Sandbags Backdrop stand Savage Primary Red Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps   Gold ring wedding altar pieces Playing cards Flowers Styrofoam block Scotch tape     The set up The inspiration for this shoot was obviously the Queen of Hearts, but I took my set design cues from the original NoFlutter drawing.  I wanted to create something similar to the swirls used in the background of the image, so I started looking at wrought iron garden fences and ended up on gold we...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cobwebs Everywhere

On October 7 th , I did a studio spooky session with Coralinx Cosplay .   The central theme of this shoot was a pretty goth girl who had a fondness for spiders and decorating with cobwebs, making it a perfect Halloween session.   Note: Cobwebs are defined as abandoned or old spiderwebs that have collected dust.   Many cobwebs are the result of comb-footed spider (i.e., black widows) that make irregularly shaped webs.   Spiderwebs are active structures built to catch prey.   (Source: Western Exterminator Company) For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 strip boxes 2 rectangular soft boxes 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 Westcott silicon gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Fake cobwebs Table ...
Post a Comment
Read more