I enjoyed another water splash session in the studio yesterday. At last I think I’m making progress in terms of getting good shapes and more coloured lighting. The flash setup was pretty similar to this, but I was using various coloured gels on the perspex in the background, and the blue drips were plopping into a blue coloured bowl below, rather onto a hard surface. Here is a fun one to start with (milk rather than blue-coloured water):

There are so many variables you can tweak that it’s a good idea to just experiment with one thing at a time. Today I was seeing what happened with using drop 2 at about 75% the size of drop 1. The answer – interesting stuff! The collision “hats” seem to get thinner and longer tendrils appear. It also helps to add a few drops of Rinse Aid to the pool they are splashing into. Here are a selection of the best ones which nearly made it for Day #1443:

With my current valve sensor setup, the depth of water in the valve reservoir is also pretty critical – once the initial measurements are done, the timings can vary wildly if the head of pressure changes too much – so I was tending to keep it topped up between 25-30ml for each shot. This gave me much more consistency and stopped me from going mad. I really need to build a Marriotte syphon to get around this issue. But that’s for another day.