Splish Splash, redux

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Then I did it. Then I was meaning to blog about it for a while. Which I'm doing now. Anyway, what I'm ranting about is my wish to try getting photos of high-speed splashes of water and milk. I've done this before, but I wanted to try again using the same lighting scheme as I did for my pictures of smoke. Although I don't have the setup shots here, I did take some, but you'll have to use your imagination for the moment. It's a very basic setup: a snooted Vivitar 285HV diagonally behind the water pointing towards it, and then opposite that, on the other side of the water, a piece of white card to reflect back some of the light. This gives a very 'low key' image, as the picture is outlined by light, but is mostly black. You'll see what I mean in a sec, if you don't already...

The actual taking of the photographs themselves is essentially a numbers game. I took about one thousand shots in total, as there is basically no way to tell whether a shot will be good or not until you look at the camera screen, and if you did that after every shot you'd go completely insane and throw the camera out the nearest window. So I put the camera on fine Jpeg and just let it fire away as I was making drops of various sizes. I'll outline quickly the process to get to this end result::

First you need to have a container for the water into which the drops will fall. A glass does the job just fine here. It's also a good idea to have another container (a shallow bowl, say) under the glass to catch all the water - saves cleaning up afterwards which is always good!

The next thing you need is to set up your camera. It needs to be on a tripod because you will be prefocusing and then switching to manual, and the camera cannot move while this is happening or else everything will be blurry. So set up your camera and tripod fairly low, so that the camera is pretty much in line with the top of your glass. I use a Nikon D50, which works pretty well, although I could have done with something with a faster frames-per-second. You definitely need a DSLR for this, as you will need to manually focus. I also used a macro lens, the Sigma 105 f2.8, but you don't necessarily need a dedicated macro lens - one with a decent close focusing distance will do.

Next you need to focus, and this can be pretty tedious. I used a pencil, which I stuck in the water, as close to the middle of the glass as I could. Half-press down your shutter, focusing your lens, then take a picture. Check the screen to make sure it's perfectly in focus. Here's my picture of a pencil:



You now need to switch to manual focus, and make sure you don't move the camera or the lens for the rest of the shoot. Although this doesn't mean everything will be in focus, as you won't get all the drops directly in the middle, it will make you have the best chance of getting a high proportion in focus. Which is the best you can hope for really.

Now on to taking the photos themselves. There are a huge amount of variables here, and getting any one of them wrong will probably spoil your photo. Hence the need to take so many. I'll go through any I can think of now.

Shutter speed: Pretty much irrelevant. My photos are lit entirely by flash. If I took a picture with the same settings and turned off the flash, there is nothing but darkness. So your shutter speed just needs to be fast enough to cut out all available light. When your photos are lit entirely by flash, they will be frozen perfectly, as the flash duration is at most about 1/4000, and I think at 1/16th power it's about 1/16000th of a second. So doing this is incredibly more efficient than trying to use shutter speed and ambient light to freeze the action. My shutter speed for most of these photos was somewhere between 1/15 and 1/60, chosen pretty much arbitrarily. If you use a very slow shutter speed, so that ambient light gets in, you might start to see a 'dragged' image - a clear image lit by the flash followed by a blurry one lit by the ambient. It might look cool, I haven't tried it yet!

Aperture: Pretty small. You want to give yourself the best chance to get in-focus pictures, so an aperture of at least f16 will allow you to be slightly off and still be in focus. It also helps to cut out all ambient light, which, as explained above, is what we want to do. A side-effect of this small aperture is that you get cool starburst type effects in your photos, like this one:



Grooveh huh?

Flash: External flash is fairly necessary here, although I suppose you could use on-camera flash to freeze the action if you wanted, but you'll probably end up with quite flat images. I use radio triggers to fire mine, from ebay. You'll probably want the flash on a low power, 1/16th or less, so that your recycle times will be high and your batteries won't die - again, so we can take as many photos as possible in a short space of time. The manual for my Vivitar 285HV says that after about 20 pops in quick sucession the flash needs a break for a couple of minutes, so keep that in mind before you abuse your flash. Don't blame me if it explodes!

The drops: Now comes the fun part. I tried various methods to get the best drops, and probably the best one was out of a small jug with a thin spout. I tried a dropper, but it's no good as you need a constant stream of drops rather than the ability to control a small number of drops. If you could set up some system that constantly and slowly drops liquid with no human intervention you would be laughing. Fill up your jug just a small bit and aim it, or whatever implement you've decided to use, at the centre of the glass of water and tilt it just enough so that drops come out. Try not to get impatient and tilt it loads, it's best to wait and hope the drops come! Once you have a steady stream, start shooting, and vary the height and distance from the centre to ensure that some of them are in focus. There's no point trying to anticipate the drops falling, just shoot as many as you can and hope for the best. After about twenty shots, check the back of your screen to see if any of them look good. Remember to zoom in to check for focus because if it's a tiny bit out it'll look crappy when you view it on your computer screen. Armed with the information you have now, alter your camera/drop maker settings until you get it just right.

When you're finished with water, try other stuff. Milk works really well, probably better, and it's amazing how different the drops look to the water ones. I also tried dropping objects in, but I didn't manage to catch any on camera. I might try it again though.

If anyone actually made it though that lot, here are some pictures I took from my latest drop-related adventure. I hope this is of use to someone.

Lemon Splashes

So this is what I was trying to do when the little water monsters appeared. In my continuing efforts to do anything but study for exams, I decided that it would be an excellent idea to try out some more high-speed photography using my flashes. The setup was simple: A bowl of water with a sheet of white paper behind it, and then one flash pointing at a 90 degree angle to the camera, and a second one bouncing off the wall for a bit of fill. I then focussed the lens (Sigma 105mm Macro) using trial and error, which is a bit infuriating but I don't think there's any other way. This is definitely 'proof of concept' (a great term for when something turns out a bit shit...) rather than a finished idea. If I wanted to do this properly, I'd need a larger container, and one that wasn't rounded: this caused a lot of distortion and difficulty focusing. Still, it was fun, and it certainly helped me in my quest to under-perform in my exams! Which is all you could ask for, really.

Little Water People

These are side-effects from a little experiment I tried, which I'll probably blog about tomorrow.







You had better be swooning in anticipation!

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Swoon!

Swoon, I say!

Moment of Clarity

I was going to write a post with a couple of pictures - nothing special, but mainly as a celebration of how I had overcome a (fairly) lengthy period of photographer's block. But, I just had a slight epiphany while out smoking a cigarette so I felt I should commit it to virtual paper while it's still fresh in my mind.

I was thinking, as one does, about the reasons why I enjoy photography, and came to a somewhat depressing realisation, which may or may not be entirely true but certainly made me think. I've noticed a certain pattern in the way I take photos and my motiviation behind them. I spend a lot of time looking at photos I admire, and trying to emulate the ideas and techniques behind them. This I have no problem with - I think it's something everyone does and it is probably the best way to learn the craft.

My epiphany revolves around the way I do this, however. As I try to emulate these pictures, I will often try it out as a 'proof of concept'; I will attempt to take a certain type of picture, and even when I don't entirely succeed I am happy if I think that I have got the basic technique right and with a little more effort, or perhaps the right conditions, I could take a picture 'just as good' as the one which I am copying.

I think this probably started with those long-exposure water shots. I always wondered how they were done before I bought a digital SLR and was using a completely automatic point and shoot camera, and it was one of the first techniques I tried to copy when I bought my Nikon D50. I had some success, then read up on filters and bought a cokin filter set with an ND filter. Even though I haven't taken any photo of flowing water that I am particularly happy with, I am satisifed that I have the technique mastered, and unfortunately this has subconsciously made me think that this is ok - it's as if just believing that I could take a picture as good as one I have seen somewhere that impressed me is all I need to do. The picture itself has never materialised and up until now this didn't really bother me.

If the above situation was a one-off, then perhaps I wouldn't be worrying so much and writing a blog post whining about it, but the more I think about it the more examples I can think of. The following picture is a particularly good example:

As you can probably see, this picture is nothing special. However, it's perfectly indicative of my problem. I was always interested in taking photos of star lines, having looked at and admired many photos of the night sky with amazing circles of stars taken over a period of a couple of hours. So I researched what I needed - a tripod, a full battery, a wide-ish angle lens, a light-pollution free sky. I tried a couple of times with little success; I didn't realise just how bright the sky around cities is, or how much of a drain on batteries long exposures are. Finally, I was somewhere dark enough to take a picture, and I tried it out. I left the shutter for about half and hour or so, and got this. It wasn't very good, but I thought that if I had just left the shutter open longer, and perhaps composed the picture a little bit better, then I could have taken a picture just as good as those I admired. Again, unfortunately, the picture never materialised. This was enough.

Again, my infra-red pictures followed this pattern. I looked at photos. I read up on filters, which lenses didn't produce hotspots, and how to post-process the pictures. Eventually, after many failed attempts, I finally produced some pictures like these, which I blogged about in my last post:

I'm repeating myself now, but again, I wasn't happy with the picture as a whole - I don't think it has anything special. But, yes you guessed it - I was happy enough to leave it at that.

It's the same for others. Those ubiqutous long-exposure, sunset-and-rocks photos, the photos of a huge sun reflecting on the water, the list goes on. It's hard to believe that I've only just realised what I have been doing all this time, and worryingly, if this trend continues, I'll run out of techniques to try and stop having fun (I can't deny that I enjoy what I do - no matter what the problems are with it) That would be a disaster.

So I'm drawing a line in the sand. I'm going to take an infra-red picture that is as strong compositionally as it is technically. I'll do the same for good ol' sunset-water-and-rocks, and I'll take a well-composed picture of proper circular star lines. This post will remind me why I'm doing it, and I won't rest until I've posted at least one good example of everything I've tried. I've 'mastered' the proof of concept, now it's time for the real thing.

The Dawn Raid

In my last post I talked about how I got up at ridiculous o' clock in the morning to take pictures in UL for the photography competition, and how I was pretty disappointed at the results. I was expecting some kind of magic light that instantly produced classic photographs, just by the virtue of me being there. Well it didn't quite work out like that, although I did take a few that I was reasonably happy with.

Last Sunday, I made a second attempt. Not out in the University, but rather in Galway. The plan was to get up at about 4.00am, drive to the Burren, and take photos there at dawn and watch the sunrise. An ambitious plan, to say the least. Well, to put it this way, getting me and my better half up at that time of the morning was the equivalent of placing a bet on a drunk elephant to walk across a tightrope while singing the Mongolian national anthem... We didn't do too bad, however. We managed to struggle out of bed and leave Galway city at about 5.30. An achievement in itself.

However, it was looking increasingly unlikely, as we sped down the road, that we would make it to the Burren before the sun began to come up. The best light is supposedly just before sunrise, and the absolute worst case scenario was sitting in the car watching what was looking like an amazing sunrise. The sky was completely clear, just what we were looking for. We quickly made an improvised plan: we decided to basically turn west, and headed for the nearest bit of coast we could find. After some initial worry, we at last got to a dirty, muddy patch of the coast that didn't look in the least bit conducive to taking beautiful photos. I was secretly pretty disappointed at this stage - I felt like the early morning effort we had gone to my have been in vain. I was to be sorely mistaken, however.

Although the landscape didn't look awe-inspiring, it didn't turn out to matter at all, because the light was a wonder all to itself. I've never seen hues like that before, and looking back on my photos they have a slightly false look about them. The light took on a presence of its own, bathing the bare scene in just about every colour imaginable - with perfect tones; nothing was over exposed or too dark.

The other incredible (and difficult) thing about the early pre-dawn light is its dynamism; it changes virtually from second to second, and literally from minute to minute. Without moving the camera I was getting pictures that looked completely different as the time went by. It's exhilerating; it's hard to describe. You have such a short time to take photos, and the light changes so often I found my adrenaline pumping within minutes of setting up the tripod and camera - despite the early morning grogginess. The fear of ruining what is probably a once-or-twice a year opportunity is pretty immense. Anyway, here are the results: These are by far my best single crop of photos from such a short time.

And that was that. All the grumpy bleary-eyed early morning mood, the panic, the fear, and the exhilaration, culminating in these four, and maybe another two or three shots that I am happy with.

"A bit... pointless", some might say.

I say there's not much in the world I'd rather do.

As a side-note; we spent the rest of the day at our intended destination; the Burren. I was happy enough to largely forget about taking photos - I couldn't ask for much more that the morning, and besides, one gigabyte memory card will only hold so many pictures! I did get one I was pretty happy with, however. The photography gods must have been smiling on me that day.