Capturing Water Droplets

This week, I have been working a lot on photographing motion and speed. My personal favorite is to photograph water droplets. I love how the end result looks very abstract and unusual. Though most of motion photography is really challenging and involves a lot of super complicated equipment, water droplet photographs can be created very simply. The first thing you want to do is set up the area that you'll be using. I generally use my kitchen sink. Since a droplet is so fast, your shutter speed is sped up to about 1/180 (with a flash) and that means you'll lose a lot of light. To compensate for this light loss you could do what I did and buy a f/2.8 lens, or you could simply flood your sink with light. I have two large studio lights that I prefer to use, which are basically oversized desk lamps. If you don't have any special lights, then a bunch of regular lamps will work just as well. When you take the photographs you'll also want to use your camera flash as well. Basically, you'll want to make your area as bright as possible; the more light the better. After you get your lights set up you need to fill up your sink a little over half way, and add dye to your water. You can use any color you want or a mixture of colors. The color not only adds creativity but it differentuates the droplet from the background, unlike clear water that blends in with its surroundings. You can also try different drinks like milk, because the different consistency creates different types of droplets. Before you start taking photographs make sure you have enough memory to store hundreds of photographs, and be prepared to take that many because its very hard to time your camera to catch a perfect drop. The better your camera is the easier it is to catch a photograph, if you have a compact camera it will be nearly impossible to get a good potograph, but if you have a pretty good SLR unit then you can set it to continuous shooting. This will allow you to take multiple photographs at a time instead of having to continuously press the shutter release. If your taking this in manual, don't forget to continuously check and make sure your exposure is right. Try to take at least five hundred photographs, and only expect two or three good ones. Once you've finally got your finished photograph it will look like a piece of art.