Psychedelic Water Drops

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Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops	Water Drops
Water Drops

Water droplets are one of those things that eventually every keen photographer with a macro lens will have a go at, it's a good wet Sunday afternoon activity and you can get some great results.  A couple of years ago I had a go and was pleased with the results, but there was nothing to differentiate them from hundreds of other examples I'd seen on the internet and in fact they were quite dull.  So, the other day I decided to have another go and see what I could do about getting something a bit different (when I say different I'm sure this has been done before but I haven't seen any).

The setup for this is really simple, I've read about people using tripods to hold pipettes, banks of flashes and infra-red beams to trigger the shot, I'm afraid I used on-camera flash, a dripping tap pot luck on the timing (the joys of digital photography with instant feedback and no developing costs).  I would like to set up a slightly more scientific rig one day, I've got some ideas I'd like to try out that would need that but this time I went for quick and easy.

The first shots were, like my last effort, fairly uninspiring, I put a clear vase in the sink, used a dishcloth to get it level, filled it with water and then left the tap slowly dripping into it.  I set the camera up on a tripod with a Tamron 180mm macro and a flash.  In manual mode set to f8.0 and the fastest flash sync speed, 1/200 on the 5D I tried to get some shots just as the drip hit the water.  The problem was focussing, clearly you need to prefocus on where the drip will land but I was having a devil of a job getting it properly sharp as the drip didn't last for long enough to do it accurately.  Eventually I realised how dim I was being and rested a chopstick (I was in the kitchen and it was the first thing to come to hand) across the top of the vase so that the drips were falling onto it, then I focussed on the chopstick.  Once it was removed I was perfectly prefocussed on the area where the drip would land.

So now I had properly focussed, grey, boring shots with far too many reflections of flash heads in them, how could I create something more interesting?  I decided to try and reflect the flash light off something and tried a white card.  Still grey and boring with reflections, they were now slightly softer reflections.  Next I decided to see what would happen if I used a reflector that would scatter the light in all directions, perhaps crumpled tinfoil?  No that would still be a colourless light, perhaps a gold reflector?  No, probably too smooth.  Finally I settled on a shiny gold gift bag that was lying around, hung it over the tap and suddenly the results started to get a lot more interesting.

The final thing was to experiment with different containers, the vase was OK but I kept getting the rim in the shot, I tried a lid from a tin of CD-Rs I had, (and tried some shots with a CD in the lid as well) but finally settled on a big glass pan lid, balanced precariously on top of the vase, this gave me a big enough area that I could keep the edge out of shot and the added advantage of getting the background right down below the water too.

Pictures of the rather Heath Robinson setup

Then it was just a case of taking lots of shots until I'd got a few that I liked, the image have had minimal post processing, some have been cropped, all have been run through Imagenomic's Noiseware filter and sharpened using the CS3 Smart Sharpen filter but that's about it.