Water drop photo - Making of

I always wanted to photograph a falling drop of water. But since I have never done that before, I had to improvise a bit...

Here is a photo of the whole setup:

I simply used a black baking tray as a drip tray. The background is a colored cardboard. Of course you could use any color or pattern here. On the right and on the left there is a SB-800, which are triggered remotely by the camera. In the middle the camera with a 105mm macro lens. The built-in flash is only used to trigger the two SB-800s. At the top of the lamp, I simply tied a PET bottle and poked a fine hole in the bottom to create regular drops.

That's about it. The rest is timing. The drops fall pretty regularly, and with time you get out when to pull the trigger. A bit of luck is still involved though :-) To avoid still seeing the ripples of the previous drop in the water, I first let the drops fall on a spoon for a while until the water was calm.

On the camera I used the following settings: Aperture 10, exposure time 1/3200 second. Since the flashes are capable of High Speed Sync, this allows you to freeze the movement nicely. I set the sharpness manually at the beginning. To do this, I simply held my finger at the spot where the water drops landed and then focused on my finger.

And this is how the result looks like. In the photo, only a few unsightly transverse splashes have been removed.

In the meantime, I have also tried a somewhat more elaborate variant. Details can be read in the entry from 17.06.2012.