Wow! I like the colors in #5 best.
Do you mind telling me how you took these photos? I always though you just wait behind your camera and click as soon as you see the splash but you did it with a 2 second shutter speed?
Thanks for the kind words!
On the "how to" side, the thing to remember is that a flash is a lot faster than a shutter, especially if the flash is very close to the subject and set to a low output. So, in a darkened room, with the shutter open, triggering the flash at the time of the splash produces these shots.
The other thing is that I want a deep enough DOF to get all of the splash in focus, if possible. Anyone who's done any macro work knows that DOF is the biggest hurdle to overcome. Well, that means I'm going to be stopping down my Sigma 180 EX macro lens to it's macro sweet spot of f/22. When I do that, shutter speed is automatically going to be too long to get anything but a blur - unless I disregard shutter speed altogether and use the speed of the flash instead.
So I dim the lights, open up the shutter speed to two seconds, and let it work for me, by giving me the time to drip a drop, trigger the event, and time it precisely for the splash-down, or rather, splash UP!
There are two basic ways to time that flash and splash with the event. One is to fire the flash manually over and over and over as you have your drops dripping, and you'll get one here and there that's usable. The other way is to set up a trigger / timer, which is what I used.
Trigger / timers can react to sound, light, pressure or the breaking of a beam of light, including laser or IR beam. The devices can be bought or built from do it yourself kits found on the internet. I put together an IR beam trigger from a kit bought on the internet to do the triggering and a timing circuit to trigger the flash at .x seconds after the drip passes between the IR transmitter and receiver.
I bought my DIY trigger/timer circuit kit online from
HiViz. Here's a shot of a test I did when I first built it with two strobes (upper left and right) fired by the newly constructed circuit:
When I break the IR beam with the Sharpie (or anything else), the trigger fires, delayed by an adjustable amount of time, up to one second.
The photo itself was taken by holding the camera with my other hand only - no other support at all, during a two second long exposure (EXIF included for those interested). Even with the very long shutter time, It's not blurry at all because it was in a darkened room and a tight aperture, so without the strobes it would have just been a picture of black nothing. The strobes were each set to just 1/128 power, for lightning-fast exposure, which was one of the major points of building the circuit - no flash sync requirement with the camera itself. The other was to get a precise adjustable delay time between trigger and fire that I can control.
Now for the platform and liquid drop delivery system.
The platform is a paint-stirring stick found in the barn with a metal "L" bracket Gorilla-glued on so I can temp clamp it to a light stand with the orange-grip clamp. I cut a hole in the stick to let the drops pass through.
Two clothespins glued to it allow me to reposition the IR LEDs as needed or remove and use them completely apart from this rig to use in other applications.
It can be powered from a 9v battery or a power supply. I'm using the power supply and the battery option is just a backup option.
The liquid drop delivery is done with this child's medicine dropper. I get no drips until I decide I'm ready for it. Then a little squeeze, and I have the control I want when I want it. It's held in place by a re-purposed wire coat hangar.
I've attached it to one of my photo light stands, which lets me adjust it up and down to fine tune the time it takes between when the drop passes between the IR LEDs and the time it hits the target, in addition to the electronic time control.
Hope that's helpful to you, and that we'll soon be seeing some high-speed stop action photos from you too!
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