Title: Water Of Life
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 7D / 100mm EF f/2.8 L IS USM
Strobist: 2 x YN560 frombehind side @ 1/64 through milky perspex
Notes: An early shot from a late night water splash session – this one before midnight so it qualifies for today’s image.
Tag Archives: strobist
Water Splashes – Improvements
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.
More Power, Igor!
I have been taking a look at some of my recent water droplet shots and wasn’t really satisfied by the depth of field I was getting, compared to some other shots I’ve seen on Flickr:
Most have been taken with the two flashes at very low power – 1/128. One option is to up the power – but the further this goes, the longer the duration of the flash – which is not good for capturing the fast events of water drop collisions. So, the other option – more flashes all on low power!
Today I took delivery of another three YN560’s and wireless triggers. They are very reasonably priced and I’ve been very pleased with their performance so far. I thought it best to go for more of the same type since I’m used to their operation and any delays etc will hopefully be consistent between them all.
So I began to set up another shoot with all five flashes:
The first was at the rear behind the perspex, using my DIY softbox. The “main” one was using a DIY gridded snoot, while the other 3 were using plain snoots. I had just got it all set up and was preparing to play with the fluid when I realised my valve sensor wasn’t working properly. Drat. Well, it was getting late, so I decided not to persue it for today. But I shall do more investigation and report back.
In the meantime, I’ve taken a few shots of this to see how pin sharp I can get things at f/22:
Not bad, I think! I’m looking forward to getting them pointed at some water splashes soon.
Coffee Cliché
Cliché Alert! OK, I know shots like this have been done to death on Flickr, but I haven’t had a go at them yet! The setup was pretty similar to the Splashy Studio Shoot from the other day – the only difference being today we had both flashes pointing at the coffee cup from each side, rather than one being a backlight through perspex:
Tinkering with the double droplet timing and flash delay gave some interesting shapes and forms. I also found a nice one for my Day #1415 and 15th MoNovember shots.
7th MoNovember ’11
Title: Reach For The Stars
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 7D / 60mm EF-S f/2.8 USM
Strobist: 1 x YN560 from each side with Stofen softbox @ 1/128, timed with CameraAxe5 and Valve Sensor.
Notes: One of my shots today from the water collision session. I thought this one looked great in mono – like someone reaching up out of the water.