Water drop HSS

[TimothyJinx]

Sorry, I couldn't resist.



Derrel, Robin - I appreciate you both so no disrespect intended. Since I kinda started this whole thing this is just my feeble attempt to be funny and lighten the mood.

 

[Robin_Usagani]

Is it pay pay per view?

 

[vintagesnaps]

Jason are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?? (or is it water droplets that migrate?)



You bunch o' water piddlers...
Edgerton Center: Water Piddler

"The strobe uses an electronic flash... ." "The flashes at different time intervals make the drops look like they are standing still..."
drops & splashes « Harold "Doc" Edgerton

 

[Robin_Usagani]

Once again let me repeat I never disagreed that the best way is to kill the ambient and use the flash to freeze the motion. In fact that is what I suggested first. I have done calculation and freeze it with my shutter. What more do you need? Seriously.. Do this shot on full sun and macro lens, no problem. I have been saying it over and over, it is not that fast.

 

[pixmedic]

Jason are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?? (or is it water droplets that migrate?)



You bunch o' water piddlers...
Edgerton Center: Water Piddler

"The strobe uses an electronic flash... ." "The flashes at different time intervals make the drops look like they are standing still..."
drops & splashes « Harold "Doc" Edgerton

The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?

 

[Gavjenks]

Once again let me repeat I never disagreed that the best way is to kill the ambient and use the flash to freeze the motion. In fact that is what I suggested first. I have done calculation and freeze it with my shutter. What more do you need? Seriously.. Do this shot on full sun and macro lens, no problem. I have been saying it over and over, it is not that fast.

I still feel like you are using "fast" incorrectly here. Speed in the real world by itself is unrelated to ability to freeze motion. It is 100% relative to magnification.

Imagine you have an electron microscope, and all you can see is a single virus in your field of view. If you expose at 1/8000th of a second, and those molecules are moving at even just one millimeter per second or whatever, you will probably get motion blur.

At the same time, if you are photographing a Russian space satellite with nothing but a 200mm lens, it could be moving several miles per second, and you could easily get no motion blur at all with shutter alone.



So there is no such thing as "not that fast" by itself in terms of freezing motion photographically. water drops exist on a level of detail and magnification very different than standard photography, and therefore you cannot apply any normal intuitions or rules of thumb about how fast is too fast when judging how easy it should be.

 

[Robin_Usagani]

But I shot it and delivered. Sigh.....

 

[o hey tyler]

electricity travels at 186,000 miles per second think about that the next time you flip a switch homeboy

 

[jowensphoto]

Flickr: Maianer's Photostream <- fun stuff.

 

[amolitor]

Imagine, if you will, that you are taking a macro photograph of a snail. Let us say, of its eye stalk. The eye stalk can move.. some distance in 1/100th of a second, right? I don't care what distance. Not very far. Call that distance x.

Macro in there until you're right up close to it, so stuff in the frame is 1/2 of x wide. x is pretty small, so you're really close, but it can be done, right?

Now set the camera to 1/100th second shutter speed.

You gonna be able to get a sharp picture of that eye stalk, or not?

 

[BRN1]

Imagine, if you will, that you are taking a macro photograph of a snail. Let us say, of its eye stalk. The eye stalk can move.. some distance in 1/100th of a second, right? I don't care what distance. Not very far. Call that distance x.

Macro in there until you're right up close to it, so stuff in the frame is 1/2 of x wide. x is pretty small, so you're really close, but it can be done, right?

Now set the camera to 1/100th second shutter speed.

You gonna be able to get a sharp picture of that eye stalk, or not?

It is possible.

 

[Gavjenks]

Imagine, if you will, that you are taking a macro photograph of a snail. Let us say, of its eye stalk. The eye stalk can move.. some distance in 1/100th of a second, right? I don't care what distance. Not very far. Call that distance x.

Macro in there until you're right up close to it, so stuff in the frame is 1/2 of x wide. x is pretty small, so you're really close, but it can be done, right?

Now set the camera to 1/100th second shutter speed.

You gonna be able to get a sharp picture of that eye stalk, or not?

It is possible.

No, it isn't. Not with the situation he set up in the post you quoted. on an 18 megapixel camera, you would have approximately 20 pixels of motion blur at 1/100th of a second, which is a huge amount. That's an amount of blur that you could see in the LCD preview easily and might erase before you even got home.

It would be possible to freeze the motion of the eye stalk at that level of magnification with shutter only, but you'd have to go to 1/2000th of a second or higher probably.

 

[DGMPhotography]

I couldn't read past the 3rd page... But I will say Gavjenks is a genius, and derrell is the man (plus we share the same name). Why don't we argue with facts instead of equations that we can't seen to agree on. Prove your point with images and exif data! If you did and I missed that, my b, ignore me, but let's just all be friends!!

 

[Gavjenks]

I couldn't read past the 3rd page... But I will say Gavjenks is a genius, and derrell is the man (plus we share the same name). Why don't we argue with facts instead of equations that we can't seen to agree on. Prove your point with images and exif data! If you did and I missed that, my b, ignore me, but let's just all be friends!!

Thank you! As to your request, if you look in the Opening Post, there are currently some photos he took that show fairly decent freezing of motion at 1/6400th of a second, shutter only.

However, they are only about 1/2 an inch from the faucet and not very spherical looking (this should get better with more time and speed per drop). Both of these things severely limit what could be done with such water drops artistically, because wobbly drops aren't as pretty, and slow falling speeds wont make things like nice pretty splashes (plus it's hard to crop out the trail of water above it and the faucet).

The OP suggested that the spherical issue could be improved by using a pinhole in a cup instead of a faucet. Probably true.

The speed issue is harder to solve. The camera is already almost maxxed out on shutter speed, and yet a drop falling at proper splashing speeds would be moving up to 10x faster probably than the one photographed here.




Whether it can still be done with a more typical setup like splashing or a drop suspended further down in mid air is an open question. I don't think it's possible to do these things with a simple shutter on a static camera, but maybe I'm wrong. Also, there are other ways to "cheat" potentially, like somehow panning and tracking the drop as it falls, or launching a drop upward so that it is at almost zero speed at the top of its arc, etc.

Feel free to give it a try yourself if you like!