Inspired by a recent posting on the Strobist blog, I decided to try some high-speed flash photographs of falling water drops myself. The Strobist post is a great tutorial on using one flash to freeze falling water drops, so I will not go over the technique here. But I will show you how I set up my shots, and the results I came up with in just a few hours.
The Setup
I decided that the kitchen sink was the best place to set my shots since I needed a continuous drip of water and it was likely to get messy. I set up a dark colored bowl under the tap and started a slow drip of water.
I set up my Nikon D300 on a tripod in front of the sink. I don’t own a macro lens, so I used a Kenko extension tube and mounted the lens on it. I used my Nikon 18-200 (Set to manual focus with VR off) for some of the shots and my Nikon 80-200 f2.8 AF-D for the others. For convenience, I used a cable release - though this isn’t really required.
For the lighting, I set up a large white reflector at 90 degrees to the camera axis – a piece of foam core I keep handy for this purpose. I decided to use my Nikon SB-600 flash and bounce the light off the reflector. For a few of my initial shots, I used the SB-600 on-camera, and swiveled the head to bounce the light off my foam-core reflector. Subsequently, I decided to take the flash off–camera, and trigger it using the onboard flash of the D300 in Commander mode. This is easy enough to do with Nikon CLS flashes like the SB-600 which make off-camera flash pretty easy.
I set the SB-600 to manual and the flash output to 1/16 power and the D300 to manual mode with shutter speed of 1/250 and an aperture f/11 to give adequate depth of field. After setting the focus manually, I fired off a few test shots, and adjusted the ISO to get the correct exposure. (I did not want to open up the aperture more than f8 or 11 to avoid losing depth of field.)
The Photographs
With the camera on the tripod, the water dripping into the bowl, the exposure and focus set and the flash positioned in place, it’s all a matter of timing! Watch the water drip and try to trigger the shutter release at the right moment. Digital makes it easy to shoot a lot!
I tried a few shots with a light colored bowl, but the dark colored bowl seemed to work better because there were less highlights to deal with. With these shots we are shooting the highlights off the water, and a light colored bowl seemed to introduce too many highlights.
I also experimented with some colored filters on the flash to add a touch of color to the images. I had some colored filters from my black and white photography days, which I simply placed in front of the flash. Between red, green and orange, the orange filter was the only one I liked. Red and green were too intense and cut out too much light.
You can see some of the results I got here.
Using this basic setup I was able to get some interesting shots in a few hours, but there’s no limit to the variations of lighting, color, liquids, flash speed that can be tried out to give some spectacular results. Head on over to the Strobist Flickr Group for some more samples of pictures people have taken using this and similar setups!
