Now that I’m working daily on Project 365 (I take a new picture every day in 2010) and it’s going so well, I’ve been challenging myself more and more. A picture I’ve always wanted to take was of a droplet splashing. We’ve all seen them, a high speed video of a drop of milk splashing, or a drop of rain, etc. This is not an easy photograph to take, but I managed to pull it off a few nights ago with red wine (Malbec to be exact).
I set up my lightbox, an external flash on my Canon 40D, and a remote/wireless flash, and set up a glass of wine in the lightbox. Once the camera and tripod were in place, I set the camera at ISO 100, f/4.0, and 1/60th of a second shutter speed. With my EF-S 24-70mm lens, I set it for 70mm and tried to focus on the center point of the surface of wine. It was tricky using manual focus to find just the right spot where I wanted the droplets of wine to splash. The idea here was to get just the right spot on the surface of the wine in focus, and any splash or droplets on the same plane. Getting this part right took a good 45 minutes or so, including the timing of the flash and droplets using a turkey baster. Finally, once I had the right timing, focus, etc, I had to wash out the glass (it was getting quite spotted with wine) and get to it. Using a cable remote, the turkey baster, and lots of patience, I just kept at it – dropping droplets one at a time into the glass, firing away over and over again. I ended up with about 640 photos, of which two I liked. The final selection is the one included in this page. I had to use Photoshop to remove some undesired light reflections and flares, and some annoying aberrations. Using a Photoshop plugin I ended up softening the photo, increasing the contrast a bit, and glossing over the photo a bit.
I’m extremely pleased with the results. It’s another notch in my belt and I’m definitely going to try this again soon and try to get more creative with the liquids and lighting.
The Just a drop please by Ben Saren, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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