Normally, I shoot at 1/60-1/125 of a second with flash. But when I want more ambient light in a photograph, I drag my shutter down to around 1/15 of a second (the value depends on the available ambient light). By keeping the shutter open that fraction of a second longer, the camera is able to pick up more ambient light from the background, producing warmer photos with more detail.

Let’s look at these two photos. Not particularly great, but they illustrate the point. Both were taken seconds apart with a Canon 5D Mark II in RAW format and there is no post-processing other than converting to JPEG, cropping and resizing.

1/60 sec, f/4.0, ISO 800

1/10 sec, f/4.0, ISO 800

As you can see the second photo look so much better. The ambient light makes the image look more natural and warmer.

If you are using a point-and-shoot camera, here are a few tips on how to achieve this effect:

• If your camera allows you to shoot in manual mode, or if you can manually adjust your shutter speed settings, then choose a shutter speed of around 1/15 of a second (again the value depends on the available ambient light). If you can’t shoot in manual mode, night-scene mode should give a similar effect.
• Change the camera settings so that the flash always fires.
• If the camera allows setting flash exposure compensation, you can reduce the flash output (and thus reduce flash shadows) by setting flash exposure compensation to a negative number.

The trade-off with dragging the shutter is that you’re often using really slow shutter speeds, meaning camera shake and subject movement can become factors. Sometimes ghosting can appear around the frozen subject.

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A couple of weeks ago, my wife asked me if I can photograph water drops for the cover of her Ph.D. thesis. First, I thought it might be very difficult without a proper equipment. After reading a couple of articles about photographing water drops I decided to give it a try.

There are also lots of electronic circuits and expensive gadgets on the market for high speed photography. Some of them claim that it is extremely difficult or even impossible to achieve this kind of high speed photography with standard photographic equipment. How difficult do you think it could be to photography water drops without an electronic devices?

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After a long preparation I set up a small home made studio. The picture on the left shows the setup that I have used to photograph water drops. As you can see the setup is very basic. The water in the square glass tray is colored with black ink to minimize the reflections of the glass. The orange thing on the cap of the plastic bottle is a thin plastic tube from which the droplets fall at a consistent rate. Good lighting is one of the essential things. I have used two flashes to illuminate the water surface, one on the camera and one behind the blue transparent film.

It is very important to mount the camera on a sturdy tripod to prevent camera movements. Although, I don’t have a macro lens, a macro lens will probably result in better photographs of water drops.

You also need to turn off AF (Auto Focus) on the lens and set the camera to manual mode. As a target for focusing, I placed a bar code (from a milk carton) in the drop’s path. I set the aperture to f/8 for enough depth of field, the exposure to 1/640 of a second and the ISO speed to 400.

I must say that it requires patience and a lot of  practice to get the right shot. You may need to shoot hundreds of photographs to get a few good ones that you will like.

The Cover Photo

If you have any other techniques about how to photograph water drops that you’d like to share, feel free to leave your comments. I’d love to learn more about photographing water drops.