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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.
Thanks a lot for sharing the technique.. Will definitely try it out..
Ingenious setup, marvelous results. Congratulations, Frank
i like the effect tried it my self with a very simlar setup just could not get the results you had but will keep trying great pictures
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thank you for sharing, how is the price of the flashes and the tripod that is sufficient for this? How essential is the flash? DO you think it is possible for Camera flash?
The price depends on many factors, but any external flash should work fine. You can also use your camera’s build-in flash, it will help you to freeze droplets, however it will not give the same effect. You must prevent camera movements somehow, so you can use any kind of support. A sturdy tripod will help you a lot to prevent any camera shake.
Hello there, thanks for the photo of the setup you used and for the tip with colouring the water with black ink – I’d never come to that myself =)
I like the result very much, particularly the soft gradient of the background and the ideally round shape of water disturbance!! Amazing!
Btw, I’ve also tried this about a year ago. (You can see the “results” here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Andy.aka.Andy/Aqualife12#). I used my point-and-shoot cam Canon PowerShot A630, it’s built-in flash and some additional light like lamps and reflectors. My drops are quite crooked and all messed up, but I saved several photos for some interesting effect =)
I’d also say that in order to get a really good “freeze” of the drop, one should use shorter exposure time than you mentioned (1/640 s).
Great picture – would you consider selling a photograph.
I am looking for a beautiful water drop pic that has not been photoshop – ie original in natures true beauty. Thank you
Gabija
Hi, I’m just wondering, i’m trying to make an image similar to this at the moment, and i am going to try this technique over the next few days.
The blue piece of film you have infront of the flash at the back, would you not have that infront of the lense to make the whole picture blue? As i imagine when i try it, it will look black for me?
Thanks for your time,
Josh.
Hi Josh,
Honestly, I haven’t tried putting a film in front of the lens, that might work as well. As an alternative you can also stick a small blue film on the flash like in this setup http://www.flickr.com/photos/mincel/4303718015/.