water droplets

[nicksie]

Starting up another gallery of water droplets - another learning project where tips would be useful!
Please don't post your own photos of drops in this thread - if you want me to look, please send me the link!
Nikki Harman

[keiththomson]

Im a bit drunk at this moment but I will try and provide some tips in a while

[keiththomson]

Ok im sober now so I might make (some) sense.....

I use one of those things for giving people eye drops. It means I can drop a single drop of water quite accurately onto an exact point. If you always trigger the shutter as soon as the drop falls, then you can change the height you are dropping from to move through the different stages of a drop and splash. This does mean that you have to be able to reach the camera shutter with one hand and drop with the other.

Have the camera setup in manual mode and manual focus so that it will take a shot as soon as you press the shutter. I found that with my 300D I was able to use the internal flash to get enough light into the scene so I can use a large enough aperture number to get enough dof. I also tried to improve this by putting a cdr inside the dish I was dropping into (got this idea from another pbase gallery) and using kitchen foil to reflect more of the flash onto the drop.

If you are shooting more horizontally (towards the drop) you can get away with less dof (because the drop and splash will all be at the same distance) but shooting downwards at something like 45degrees means that you need extra dof for the splash (which will move closer to the camera).

Ermm only other thing I can think of it take lots of pics and keep viewing them on the computer as quite often a drop will look good on the cameras lcd but not quite in focus on the computer.

Hope this helps....

[castledude]

keiththomson
Hope this helps....

It did for me thank you.

May I suggest you copy this into the description of your drops gallery also. It might help others when they see your pictures.