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.