Workshops

...Shoot Water Droplets

Shooting water droplets can be a messy business, but it is infinitely rewarding. The results may not always be what you expect, but they’re usually interesting and always diverse.

Please note that my original set-up was very ‘thrown together’ to put it politely! This is purely a guide to get you started cheaply and quickly.

EQUIPMENT

For this type of photography there is specific equipment that you will need. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but you will need to spend a bit of time getting your set-up right.

DSLR camera (or film, but this article will be aimed at digital)
Macro lens – though a standard zoom will give good results too
Tripod
At least one flashgun capable of dropping its output to 1/32nd or less – more on this later
Large deep baking tray
Empty plastic bottle
Cup
Length of narrow plastic tubing, approx 5mm in diameter
Assorted food colourings
Water
A room in which you can shoot in near darkness
Remote shutter release
Reflectors - I use some white cardboard
Clips, clamps, tape and various items you will find around the house to do a bit of diy!
Silicon sealant – the type you use for sealing around baths or sinks
A length of wood or dowelling rod
Ruler or serated edge knife (for focusing on)

SET-UP

I will explain how I got started with this, my set-up now is a little different as I have more specialist items and equipment, but it is possible to get started with items you may have lying around the house. Its messy and fiddly but very enjoyable, and once you get a few successful shots, chances are you will want to spend a little money to improve your set-up and make life easier! At the end I will explain my set-up now compared to how I started.

So firstly you need to make a mariotte siphon (link below to instructions). Mine is nowhere near the standard it should be, but it works! I just made a hole in the side of a plastic bottle near the base, pushed the plastic tubing in and sealed it with some silicon. Fill your baking tray with water, and position your mariotte siphon somewhere nearby higher up. I was lucky to find somewhere with a shelf above but you can improvise with books, cd’s or anything you can find to elevate it! You will then need to clamp your pipe somehow so that it is vertical over your baking tray. I have a length of dowelling to the right of the baking tray with a metal strut coming out horizontally the hold the pipe over the tray. Tape and clamps then hold the pipe at a vertical angle. Start with the end of the pipe roughly 2 feet above the tray. You can adjust it later.

Of course this all sounds incredibly messy and thrown together, but it demonstrates what you can achieve for very little cost. If you are good at diy (i’m not!) you can spend the time and make a very neat and organised set up. I will provide some links below to some images of set-ups.

Position your reflectors at the back and to the side of the baking tray. Position your flash so that it is aimed across the baking tray and will bounce of your side reflector. But be aware that if like me, you are starting out with just one flash and no fancy sync equipment you will need to be able to reach it to fire it using the test button. If you have 2 flashguns, and can wire them together to fire in sync, even better. Many flashguns already come with the sync cable to allow you to do this. Position the other flashgun to bounce off the reflector behind the tray. If you have 2 flashguns its a good idea to have some sort of diffuser to dull the glare a little. Frosted glass or perspex makes a good diffuser.

CAMERA & SETTINGS

Now you are ready to set up your camera. Aim you camera at the baking tray, be aware that this is a messy business, and the closer your camera is to the set-up, the more likely it is to get splashed. A few drops won’t do much harm but you will have to remember to check your lens for droplets and wipe them off. This is where a macro lens is handy as you won’t need to be as close.

Raise your siphon so that water starts to drip into the tray. Place a ruler or serated edge knife (easy items to focus on) across the tray in the line of the drips and note where they are landing. This is where the ruler is handy as you can note the number the drips are falling on! Try to position the ruler so that the drips are falling right onto the front edge. You can then stop the drips, look through the lens and manually focus on the ruler.

Once you are happy with the focus, you can adjust the camera settings. I use an f/stop around f/16. With a macro lens this will still give you a tiny depth of field, but you will need a lot of light to get a decent exposure. This is where 2 flashguns have the advantage. With one flashgun you will have to drop your f/stop or increase your ISO. I have the ISO as low as possible, 160 or 200 at the most. Set your exposure time to 2 seconds.

You may be surprised at the exposure time? The reason is that you are using the flash to stop the motion of the splash and not the camera’s shutter speed. On a good camera you can achieve shutter speeds of 1/8000 of a second. Pretty fast, but still not fast enough to completely freeze a water droplet splash, and you would need an awful lot of light to get that speed. However, a good flashgun can fire a burst of light that lasts 1/35000 of a second, so to freeze something as fast moving as water this is by far the better way. Many flashguns allow you to drop the output from 1/1 (full) down to 1/128th. Some will only go to 1/16th but that is still fast enough to achieve a flash speed of roughly 1/15000 of a second. Much slower than that and you will start to see motion in your droplets, which has the effect of making them look blurred. The faster you can get your flash to fire, the sharper your shots will be.

If your flashgun doesn’t have an output adjustment setting, don’t worry, I will provide some tips and links at the end for modifications you can do easily. So for now set the flash to the lowest output it has.

TAKING THE SHOT

Once you are all set up, this is where the fiddly bit starts. When I first started I felt like I didn’t have enough hands, but you soon adapt and find ways around it!

If you want to create ‘collision’ shots like the one above, where one drop has entered the water creating a spout and another has then hit the spout to create the collision shape, then you will need your water flow to be pretty fast. Not so fast that the water is a constant stream, but too fast for you to see each individual drop forming from the end of the pipe. You may need to raise or lower your siphon to achieve this, or add more water.

Once you are happy with that turn off the lights, since you need semi-darkness to allow the flash to stop the motion. I shoot in my garage but I leave the light on in the kitchen which is just through the door so that I can see enough to find my way around and just about see the set-up.

The easiest way I found to get around not having enough hands was to set the camera to continuous shooting and lock the shutter release on so you can forget about having to fire the camera. You may find it easier to hold the shutter release in the same hand as the mug and fire it manually.

Now hold a cup under the stream to stop the drops hitting the water, and let the water in the tray settle for a moment, blow away any bubbles that have formed, then when you are ready, listen for the camera shutter to open, remove the cup, fire your flash, close your shutter (if firing manually) and replace the cup under the stream. You can stop to check your shot or keep repeating until your arm starts to ache! The cup is a good way to stop drops falling in between shots which can make the water very choppy and messy looking, it will also minimise the amount of bubbles you get forming.

This is where your timing will be crucial, and in the burst of flash illuminating the drops you will often be able to see whether it looks like you got a good shot or not. This bit needs plenty of practise to get the timing right, but you will get the hang of it and start getting a good results. When I started I was getting maybe 2 or 3 shots that were ok out of 100, not a great percentage. But with practise I got it up to about 1 in every 5 or 6 shots, much better!

EXPERIMENTING

Once you have the hang of the technical side of shooting, you can then start to experiment a little. Different liquids at different temperatures have very different viscosities and surface tension, and so will create different shapes. Warm water for instance moves a lot faster than cold.

Adding a few drops of dishwasher rinse aid to water will increase the surface tension (without creating bubbles like washing up liquid) and make ‘stretchier’ splashes. Adding glycerine will increase the viscosity, making the water move slower and appear ‘thicker’.

Try adding food colouring or inks (be careful of the splashes though, wear plastic gloves to add it to the liquid. I have dyed my fingers more times than I care to remember!) Anything you add will alter the way the liquid moves in some form or other.

Milk is a good alternative to water. It takes colour very well, moves slower and is thicker and also makes nice ‘stretchy’ splashes. Just make sure its ice cold, and be sure to clean up straight afterwards because it goes off very quickly and the smell is not good!

Try raising or lowering your pipe to see what effect it has, or adjust your water flow a little.

Try different coloured backgrounds. Coloured translucent sweet wrappers stuck onto your reflectors work very well and scatter the light nicely. Or tape them over the flashguns for different effects.

ADAPTING YOUR SET UP

This type of photography is very addictive, and you may find once you start getting good results that you want to spend a little money adapting your set-up to make life easier. There are some very expensive kits on the market that will control everything for you – droplets, flashgun and camera, and take the guesswork out of getting the perfect shot. But you can still get a good, accurately adjustable kit for a little money which makes life a lot easier.

My set up now consists of 2 flashguns, a solenoid attached to the end of the water pipe, a photogate ir beam trigger which is positioned beneath the solenoid so the droplet passes through the beam, and that is wired to an electronic delay circuit, called a HiVis kit, which fires the flashguns. The HiVis kit is wired to a transmitter which wirelessly fires 2 flashguns which I have in receivers on tripods.

I have a push button attached to the solenoid which is mains powered. I hit the button which opens the solenoid to release a few droplets and they pass through the photogate, which is attached to the HiVis kit. This then triggers the flashguns to fire after a programmable delay. This means you can adjust the settings until you get the splash collision, or whichever shape you want, and you can repeat this as often as you wish.

Its sounds very expensive, but actually was not! The solenoid and its power supply was donated by a friend – ask around, if you know anyone that tinkers with engines they may have one lying around. The push button trigger was also made for me by a friend in work. The HiVis kit was bought from the USA for around £20 including postage, but you will need to have a basic understanding of electronics, or know someone who does to be able to put it together, as it is in kit form. There are comprehensive instructions online which are not too bad to follow though. A push button for the solenoid would be fairly easy to make too.

The wireless flash transmitter with 3 receivers was bought from Ebay for under £30, but is not a necessity since two flashguns can easily be wired straight to the HiVis kit and is shown in the instructions if you buy one.

My 2 flashguns were bought on Ebay, one cost £2.99 and one cost £7. I have bought a more expensive one for £30 but found the cheaper ones actually worked better!

TIPS AND TRICKS

Some of the cheap flashguns that you can pick up on Ebay don’t have an option to drop the output to achieve faster speeds. However it is possible to modify them very cheaply. There is a link below to a method for doing this. However, if you want a quick fix, check to see if your flash has a light sensor on it – some of the older ones have a slide button across them which modifies the amount of light they can ‘see’. I bought a cheap small led torch and taped it across the light sensor. This has the effect if fooling the flash into dropping its output as it sees the brightness of the torch. Make sure you change the batteries in the torch regularly though, because as the power in the torch drops, the output of the flash will increase and you will find it affects the sharpness of your shots.

Ebay is definitely the place to go to pick up cheap bits and pieces for your set-up. This is potentially an expensive type of photography, but its surprising how cheaply you can achieve great results if you look around.

If you are using a mug or cup to catch the drips in between shots, wrap a thick piece of kitchen roll or a teatowel around it to catch any stray drip that may fall off the side of a shot as you move the mug.


Hopefully you will have found this very helpful, but once again remember this is what worked for me. I found a great deal of information online when I started by searching around, there are certainly plenty of people doing this type of photography, and far better than I am and some of them have some great blogs on it. Just have fun and experiment and hopefully you will get some great shots out of it!

LINKS

Mariotte Syphon
A great diagram showing how to make the mariotte siphon. Check out the rest of the site too, Martin Waugh is an authority on shooting water droplets

Flashgun Modification
Diag 1 for flash modification

Flashgun Modification cont
Diag 2 for flash modification

Example of a good set-up

Great water drop images
Some fantastic images from Keith Trueman, who built the above set-up

HiVis Kits

Stopshot
Link to the Cognisys site, to view Stopshot Modules, a more sophisticated version of the HiVis kits