Freezing the action: Splashes and Flows

The captures made using high speed photography techniques, which are used to freeze the time, are truely amazing and inspiering. The spilt of a second is hard to experience from the naked-eye (actually it might not that hard to see nice frozen moments in a disco party). Therefore, most photographers  keen to capture the exact moment, exact action which can be admired by almost all the people. There is a vast collection of such photos and tutorials on above technique is available in the internet. Inspired by their work, I decided to work on mine and share my experience. May be you have known this before, or even mastered it. Yet I just want to share this with you.

The equipment I used are,

• Nikon D3100 camera.
• Tamron AF 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC LD Aspherical (IF) MACRO lens.
• Nissin Di622 Mark II speedlight.
• 30 cm $latex \times$ 30 cm softbox made by myself.

I know they are not the best, but they are more than enough for get the job done. At the moment I am using D3100 built-in popup flash to trigger the off-camera Nissin speedlight.

Splashes:
The setup is illustrated in the  figure below.

• Use a colored paper or wall as the background. It will add a nice flavor to the water.
• The glass is filled with water and I used to drop grapes to make the splashes. Water will be spilling all around. Therefore, make sure to use this setup in a proper place.
• Take the speedlight with the softbox close to the glass as close as possible. Moreover, make sure to cover them with a water proof transparent sheet. You do not want mess them with the water.
• Set the camera with a safe distance which avoid the spilling water.
• For camera settings, I used Manual mode with,
• Shutter speed: flash sync speed (1/200 for D3100). If you have high speed sync capability, you may try it. I have no experience with it.
• Apeture: make it small (f-8 to f-11). Henceforth, you can make sure that everything is focused.
• ISO: some lower values (100-200).
• focus: auto focusing at the begining. Then switched to manul in order to avoid refocusing issues under low light.
• Try to use a remote trigger to operate the camera. It will avoid shaking the camera. If you do not have a remote trigger or it just got skrewed like mine, you can use the self timer.

Drop the objects. Shoot them several times. Results will be rewarding :)

Flows:
Here, we need a nice white background. Therefore, I am using my speedlight to light the background (wall). From the camera settings, I overexpose the background and make it looks like a white (almost) back drop. The setup is as follows:

Side view

Top view

The rest of the steps are quite similar to 'Splashes' scenario.

• Camera setting follows the same. However, the aperture needs to be adjusted such that the background is overexposed and produces bright white pane.
• I used colored water to have a contrast between the flow and the background.
• Start pouring the water, and shoot them.
• Finally, grab the glass from the top and lift it up, take one photo of its base. This is used to add the base during the post-processing.

Water drops:

This is captured about a year ago when I do not have the speedlight. I used camera's built-in pop-up flash as the light source. It lights up the background and, using a black cover I cut out the direct light on the water container. It ensured that the water drops are illuminated by the reflected light from the wall which avoids unnecessary bright reflections.

The rest of my shots can be found here. Just want to say that "practise makes perfect".

Courtesy of: SnapKnot