At 36 minutes, I thought this might have run a bit long, but the entire process was so fascinating to me that the time flew by. Very well presented Andrew. Congratulations on a number of really fine photos. 🙂
Thanks so much, Tom! I tried cutting it down actually but there was a lot of info I tried to get across! Thankfully I didn't upload the 5 hours I spent taking thousands of test images!
Andrew, I used an old burette for generating the drops. This allow you to see where the drops land for focussing & by adjusting the tap you can increase or decrease the drop rate.
Hi Tom, just a couple of suggestions. When you've worked out where the drop is going to hit, put a ruler in the spot and manually focus your lens on that. You can use masking tape to ensure your focus ring doesn't move from that spot. You can make sure your tripod doesn't move by simply looping a bag over the main column and then filling the bag with something heavy. The weight of whatever-it-is pulling the tripod down through the centre of gravity will very quickly make the tripod very steady and able to absorb vibration from the camera.
Tricks and tips: use a smaller dish and put it in your sink, standing on some cups or something. You can set the tap at the right amount so it drips maybe one drop a second, and it's always gonna be in the same spot. Easy to keep focus, easier to time since you only need to handle the camera, never have to deal with excess water if the dish gets full since it just drips into the sink, and you don't need to refill the pipette.
I've seen so many people using a valve and trigger system, so this is very refreshing to see a manual method. I use an eyedropper, but I should try a finer droplet size.
Thank you very much. I also got one and do enjoy every time I use the splashart, one thing I tried and worked very well was to add some ice to your reservoir mixture. That alters your consistency completely and give a whole different look to your splashes.
we did something similar some years ago. the best way to focus, that worked for us, was the following: put a screw upright into the water, so that the pin-pointed end of the screw pokes through the water-surface, where the drop is hitting the water. this gives an excellent, very very tiny and sharp thing to focus on. works every time with no effort at all. beside that, you don't need remote flash-triggers, when your camera has an internal flash. we just used the interal popup-flash of the 600D we used, to trigger the other two flashes. as long the flashes have some line-of sight to each other, no additional triggers are needed.
Why would you not attach flash trigger on camera? One less thing to handle. Instead of dropper, IV fluid tube cab be used to control pacing of the drops. IMHO
i made a rig using a medical IV line connected to a bottle then i regulated it in a constant rate so i can predict the drops, never thought of colouring the water with milk to make it opaque. Great tip and video!
Many thanks for an excellent macro tutorial and very helpful editing advice. Looks like a combination of fun and frustration and the final image was great. It is on my list of things to try once I have a bit more experience with flash.
Great to see your anthausiasm but even more the shooting without expensive means especially for this! Something that makes you feel like you really took the photo yourself! awesome!! greetings Marjolein Netherlands
Yeah! Patiently doing your thing has, I’m sure saved a lot of photographers a lot of time and as always, one can build on your experimental methods and grow the procedures to achieve the desired effect. Thank You it is a cracking result, inspiring! DG New Forest UK.
Andrew, WOW. That is super amateur photography which ultimately resulted in a prize-winning photo. Again simple, do it yourself at home. Great the way you present it without any arogance but simply simple and sympathetic. Great, thanks for your video.
Nice to see somebody doing this without the fancy kit. I had a nightmare with timing but also focus because I didn't have my water container mounted on anything... Thanks for this, great tips. My method is shooting at about 125th/s with my most powerful speed light at a low power for the fast flash. I drop the water then just try to time my shutter release cable. Cool if the 4 second shutter speed works for you but that makes me somewhat uneasy 🤣
When i did this back in 2010 i made a timber frame and used a plastic bag and put a tiny hole in the bag for the droplets. It worked for single droplets, but i never managed to get the collision type of droplets. I had the flash set to go off as soon as the trigger was released, after about 30 minutes of trial and error i was getting 95% hit rate on my shots. Aperture was around f11 to f14 and shutter speed was 1/250 sec.
Sounds like a complicated setup but I'm impressed you got the shots you wanted with it! It's one I want to try again as it was really fun doing it but it took a long time to get it all set up.
Thanks Amna! With continuous lighting you'll be relying solely on a very fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, possibly around 1/2000 of a second to freeze it in Sharp focus. so you'd need a very powerful continuous light (rather than just natural, window light, for example) to get enough light in your images. I'd be very interested to see how well it works!
Bloomin' Marvellous. Great explanation, here's me dripping water from a bag with a pin hole in it, the couple of times I have tried this. I did get some rather striking images, or so I thought. Your pictures were outstanding. Thanks Andrew. Now where did I put that Turkey Baster, Bigger Drips=Better ;-)..No? Never thought of backlighting the water container/drip. Will be trying this soon. Also didn't consider the longer shutter time either, looks effective, although I do not recall having to do a remote shutter release/flash trigger tango ;-) Be well.
No one seems to know about Edgerton out of MIT from the sixties and fifties who did who did milk strobe photography with film when it was very difficult
Andrew, planning a workshop on this subject at my camera club and your method is perfect, can set up 3 or 4 tables so we can all have a go. Wondering what size pipettes you use. Thanks for a great video 👌
Interesting, but I really don’t know why you just don’t trigger the flash by your camera! Then the speed would be 1/200 and the available light is not of a big concern. The right timing to trigger is as crucial as it is with the camera open with 4 sec or so! Cheers Didi
I use a couple of Godox AD200 lights, which are very affordable for what they are. I find Godox decent generally and you can get their smaller lights (which will do fine for this sort of money) for even less -- you'll need their trigger to get them working off your camera though). You could probably get a whole setup for around £200/$200 that would do the job nicely.
