The Splash Project

Ok so I was surfing utube lately and kept coming across videos of high speed photography. It got me a little inspired to work on something without people for once. It's been quite awhile but it came back very quickly how I used to love little projects like this. Water is definitely one of those mediums that I will continue to shoot always. It's ever changing and there are infinite possibilities. The first three images I focused on capturing drops of water. Very easy to do once you know the process. No fancy equipment here. Just a dark room, a cooking pot full of water, one or two speedlights, a sandwich bag with a pinhole in it, my camera and a tripod. A macro lens is preferred but I just went with my trusty 50mm 1.4.

I filled the sandwich bag with water and hung from a boom on a light stand so I had a steady stream of drops into the pot. For this I had to use manual focus because the room was too dark. Used a length of tape which I had drawn a point to focus on. Since the water was about an inch below the tape line it made for a good guess as to where my drops might end up when frozen. Once focus was locked I removed the tape and started shooting. For camera and flash I did something a bit strange. I used a slow shutter (about 2 sec.) and used the speedlight in manual at it's lowest power. This gave the quickest burst of light. Since the room was dark no noise was introduced. It also made for some interesting effects. Notice the 3rd image has a blend of frozen motion on the main splash and the drops outwards have a bit of motion blur. Cool. Kind looks like a meteor storm. I thinks these were at around F4. Timing was everything. Being aware of the rhythm like a heartbeat or music really helped me get into the zone. The blue tint was actually food colouring. Also not much in post just some colour saturation and a little dodge and burn. A touch of highpass sharpening helps it pop too. Enjoy.

For this next set I focused on a clean look and again a very simple set up. The glass is suspended above a bucket (Tried not to make a mess). I did this in my kitchen using only my white wall as the background. Lighting was again with a speedlight (SB900) pointed towards the wall behind the glass. For this I decided to breakout the PW mini and flex and show off  it's high speed sync. 50mm 1.4 set to F7 about 1/1000 to 1/1200 ISO 100. I used AFC and poured and pressed the shutter. Again not much in post. Just brightened the colours and added a little contrast. Also burned out the backgrounds a bit to keep a consistent white. Hope you all enjoyed just a little fun with simple items most of us have around the house. Till next time.