A very long sought obsession for photographers and artists has been to carve out the complexity in simple water drops. After a very tiring effort of about 4-5 hours, I managed to get about 350 pictures of waterdrops, of which I liked only about 30 and these 5 are among them. This is a very difficult task to perform and requires patience ( the most difficult part) along with many other headaches. Here are the things that you will need. You can do this exercise very comfortably in dark indoors using camera flash. 
1. Dripping water. A tap which is a bit far from the wall supporting it(about 2 feet) serves well but then such taps are difficult to find. I had used a plastic bottle with a small hole and had stuck a toothprick in the hole to help regulate the dripping rate.
2. Vessel. Never pick steel vessel . It competes for a lot of attention in flash light(see right side pic). Plastic vessel with wide opening(about 6 inches) is good-Nothing like it if you have a blue vessel. You will neeed to fill this vessel upto the brim.
I tried another setup too, where I tried to turn my bathroom into a blackbox. 
But it blew because I could not find a space for keeping my background. Now coming to the camera, you'l need to set it to Flash on mode and make sure it is the only significant source of light. Set the shutter speed to about 150 and use a large aperture (This is the aperture size with a smaller fstop number). Large aperture will ensure a smaller depth of field and will keep the surroundings (like background and vessel's periphery) out of focus so that they dont compete for attention. Keep the ISO as low as possible.Turn the auto focus of the camera off.It is impossible to get these pictures with autofocus. Position your camera close the the vessel and manually set the focus on the point of contact of drops and vessel. Try to bring your camera closer and set the focus manually to the least distance your camera has, mine had 0.5 metrewith macro. If your camera has a macro lens, use that as well (You'l need to turn off wide/tele/closeup to use this lens). The closer the camera , the better the pictures will be but make sure you are only as close as the focal length is. For further close-up it will be better to crop the images out instead of getting closer to get more magnification. Now, let the water drip and take lots of pictures, for starters let the source drip fast, so that you get more action pictures, when you get a grasp of your camera's performace, slow it down and keep taking pictures. Keep changing the camera's height and angle after about every 20-25 shots and readjust the focal length accordingly. Try changing shutter speed too. Dont reduce the aperture though.Take a lot of pictures and keep reviewing them time to time to see if you are going wrong somewhere and try correcting it. Another good trick is using stuff other than water drops (like peanuts, pebbles) to capture more explosive splashes. In the most explosive splash in above pictures (tallest one with green background) I dropped gems (ha ha ha! yes cadburry gems) from about 1 and half feet. Gems serve as good advantage because they are circular (giving natural looking splashes) , coloured ( giving additional effect, although I couldn't exploit it) and a consistent sized (giving regular splashes). But you wont be able to enjoy them after the same way after the exercise as they'l look horribly worn out like this .. 
When you are done, crop them to your requirements. Try sticking to the rule of thirds while cropping. Finally if you do this entire exercise, let me know anything new that you learn while you were at it and share your pictures too.
A very long sought obsession for photographers and artists has been to carve out the complexity in simple water drops. After a very tiring effort of about 4-5 hours, I managed to get about 350 pictures of waterdrops, of which I liked only about 30 and these 5 are among them. This is a very difficult task to perform and requires patience ( the most difficult part) along with many other headaches. Here are the things that you will need. You can do this exercise very comfortably in dark indoors using camera flash.
1. Dripping water. A tap which is a bit far from the wall supporting it(about 2 feet) serves well but then such taps are difficult to find. I had used a plastic bottle with a small hole and had stuck a toothprick in the hole to help regulate the dripping rate. 
2. Vessel. Never pick steel vessel . It competes for a lot of attention in flash light(see right side pic). Plastic vessel with wide opening(about 6 inches) is good-Nothing like it if you have a blue vessel. You will neeed to fill this vessel upto the brim.
I tried another setup too, where I tried to turn my bathroom into a blackbox. 
But it blew because I could not find a space for keeping my background. Now coming to the camera, you'l need to set it to Flash on mode and make sure it is the only significant source of light. Set the shutter speed to about 150 and use a large aperture (This is the aperture size with a smaller fstop number). Large aperture will ensure a smaller depth of field and will keep the surroundings (like background and vessel's periphery) out of focus so that they dont compete for attention. Keep the ISO as low as possible.Turn the auto focus of the camera off.It is impossible to get these pictures with autofocus. Position your camera close the the vessel and manually set the focus on the point of contact of drops and vessel. Try to bring your camera closer and set the focus manually to the least distance your camera has, mine had 0.5 metrewith macro. If your camera has a macro lens, use that as well (You'l need to turn off wide/tele/closeup to use this lens). The closer the camera , the better the pictures will be but make sure you are only as close as the focal length is. For further close-up it will be better to crop the images out instead of getting closer to get more magnification. Now, let the water drip and take lots of pictures, for starters let the source drip fast, so that you get more action pictures, when you get a grasp of your camera's performace, slow it down and keep taking pictures. Keep changing the camera's height and angle after about every 20-25 shots and readjust the focal length accordingly. Try changing shutter speed too. Dont reduce the aperture though.Take a lot of pictures and keep reviewing them time to time to see if you are going wrong somewhere and try correcting it. Another good trick is using stuff other than water drops (like peanuts, pebbles) to capture more explosive splashes. In the most explosive splash in above pictures (tallest one with green background) I dropped gems (ha ha ha! yes cadburry gems) from about 1 and half feet. Gems serve as good advantage because they are circular (giving natural looking splashes) , coloured ( giving additional effect, although I couldn't exploit it) and a consistent sized (giving regular splashes). But you wont be able to enjoy them after the same way after the exercise as they'l look horribly worn out like this .. 
When you are done, crop them to your requirements. Try sticking to the rule of thirds while cropping. Finally if you do this entire exercise, let me know anything new that you learn while you were at it and share your pictures too.
2 comments:
Hey Anshul, nice work man... Where can i find this info on photography??? Do you have some links.. I'm planning to buy a Cannon DSLR i selected...
hey jhur really fandu pics.
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