Making a Splash 2

Following on from my previous post about water drop photography in this post I tried it with milk drops instead. Milk is more dense than water so produces a more interesting splash. Full cream milk is the best followed by semi skimmed and finally skimmed. I only had semi skimmed but it gave resonable results anyway.

 I used a different arrangement this time. Instead of using a tray of water to catch the drops I used a piece of glass from an A4 photo frame on top of an A4 sheet of red paper. This gives a coloured reflective surface. I used a dark cloth for the background and suspended a pipette full of milk 30cm above the glass. I made a tiny hole in the pipette which gave a slow,steady drop rate. The technique is much the same for the water drop photography.

I added some food colouring to the milk to give a bit of colour to the result in some of the shots. The resulting splashes look very different producing some very intricate splash crowns when you get the timing just right.

Making a Splash 1

I've been wanting to try my hand at water drop photography for a while but I don't have a lot of expensive equipment to get the best results. So I searched the internet and Youtube for ways of doing it cheaply.

You can buy electronic gadgets that control water drop flow, fire off flash units and who knows what else but it will set you back several hundred pounds.

So this is what I did. I found a clean A4 sized paint tray which I filled two thirds with water. I used a piece of red cloth for a background behind the tray. I half filled a sandwich bag with water and clamped it to a bamboo cane suspended about 50cm above the tray.I actually use a mini photo studio which I bought from Amazon for less than £30 . It has proved useful for all kinds of indoor macro photography. It comes with cloth backgrounds red,blue, black and white, two photographic lights, and a mini tripod more suitable for a compact camera than a heavy DLSR.

I used a pin to make a hole right at the bottom of the sandwich bag to start the drips flowing and adjusted the tray till the drops were right in the centre at the deep end. I set up my camera on a tripod pointing down at the drops at an angle of 30 degrees or so. I used my Tamron 18-250mm lens at about 200mm setting so I could be far enough away from the action not to get the equipment wet but still get a full frame of the subject. The camera was on Manual Focus setting,  F11 aperture, iso 800 and 1/200 sec exposure. I focused on the drop zone by placing a piece of plastic right where the drop strikes the water and getting that into sharp focus. I used the two photographic lights on either side of the tray and a third light source reflecting onto the background to give some colour reflection in the water.

I found by experimentation that the photographic lights were not bright enough and so I used the camera's built in flash instead which gave excellent results.The secret is to fire the shutter with a remote cable just at the moment the drop leaves the bag. You soon get the hang of it. I then tried an additional hole close to the first giving two drops. I would wait till the two drops were in sync and fire the shutter to get some interesting results. I also added some green food colouring to give a greenish tinge to the later photos.

Fumaria Officinalis ... A Hidden Secret

In early spring I was out walking and collected some pollen samples from random flowers along the route that had started to bloom. When I got home I examined the samples under the microscope. Pollen fascinates me because of the great variety of shapes and sizes and I had started to work on photographic techniques to show individual shapes in 3d rather than the normal flat stained bright field images i'm used to seeing.

As I examined one particular specimen from a tiny purplish flower under low power I noticed as I focused in and out it seemed to have an extraordinary shape. I quickly increased the magnification up to 200x then 400x. Each pollen grain was spherical with six small dome shaped lobes stuck regularly around the body. It looked more like some alien craft or a space station out of Star Treck than a tiny grain of pollen!

Meanwhile I had identified the plant as Common Fumitory.The name is derived from Latin Fumaria Officinalis and means 'smoke of the earth'. If you pull the plant up the roots give off an acrid smell which has been compared to nitric acid fumes! When you see a whole bush of it, it does look a bit like smoke with its blue green colour.

I needed to get more samples but could not find the plant even though I carefully retraced my steps around the park and down along the old dry canal bed.I finally found the plant a few days later on the footpath of a bridge over the A38 dual carriageway! No surprises as Fumaria Officinalis (it's Latin name) is often found at roadsides and on disturbed ground. Several weeks later I found a large bush of the plant on the verge of Darnford Park car park.

Anyway back at the lab I tried taking dozens of images at different focus points at the highest magnification I've got - 1000x. Then I used stacking software, CombineZP, to merge them into one 3d image. I was happy with the results and I've posted them below. I also tried adding a bit of colour using Rheinberg filters.

From a distance Common Fumitory can resemble bluish green smoke

A close up shot. There are 10 - 15 flowers on each stem.

Common Fumitory 10x magnification

At 100x magnification you can begin to see the strange shape of each pollen grain.

400x

1000x using a blue and green Rheinberg filter.

1000x looking like some kind of alien craft.