I understand you have just purchased a new DSLR camera and are trying it out. You have taken copious amounts of photos of your family, your dog (or cat, depending on your preference. I am not here to judge), your car, flowers, your own face, sunrise and/or sunset, random strangers on the street (ok, that is getting a little creepy) and you want to try something a little more challenging. Step right up and let me tell you about my quest to shoot the perfect water drop….
People will always be drawn to water and if you have a camera, you will probably be drawn to capturing it in its many forms. Scenic vistas are often made more beautiful if there happens to be a body of water in such as an ocean, waterfall, or babbling brook. Even the fallen rain onto leaves or the reflection of the sky in a puddle holds its own artistic allure. Have you ever tried to capture a falling water drop or the splash after a drop hit the water? It is often easier said than done.
My own adventures into this type of photography have met with varying degrees of success. There is nothing better (not) than having a full hour of shooting literally hundreds of photos to look and find out that you missed most of the splashes, the lighting is too dark or too bright, or all the photos are blurry (In my defense here, my up-close vision is poor because as my ophthalmologist told me I have old eyes. All the shots look blurry when looking at the back of my camera so I just figure it is my vision, not that I have blurry images.)
I have tried a variety of liquids from water to oil to milk to glycerin to honey. Honey is a beautiful colour in the light and moves in very interesting ways but you really have to have the patience of a heron (side note: herons are very patient. Watch them and see if you don’t mind waiting) to wait for the drops to drop and in the end, I mostly missed the moment of contact with the surface of the water or milk in the catch receptacle because I nodded off. Glycerin is similar in consistency and seems to just slide into any other liquid without much energy or flourish. Water is a wonderful thing to capture because of its transparency. The play of light on it, the movement, it’s all interesting and if you add food colouring it becomes even more fun.
WARNING: science content. Let’s take a look at the physics of a water droplet. The simplest way to form a water drop is to allow it to flow slowly from the lower end of a vertical tube of small diameter. The surface tension of the water causes it to hang from the tube forming a pendant (the typical water drop shape: round on the bottom and pointy at the top). When the drop exceeds a size that is no longer stable it will detach itself and falls. The falling drop retains its shape by the force of surface tension. This shape will change depending on the size of the drop. A drop of 2 mm (in diameter) will be more or less spherical but bigger drops start to flatten out. Slightly larger than 6 mm the drop deforms so much that it will break apart.
Working in a lab, I have access to all sorts of tubing, syringes and drop-makers. I have varied the size and speed of drops produced by said equipment. Photos have been shot from the level of the water to get above and below the water, shot at an angle, close up and VERY close up too. Everything you adjust will change the shape and the size of the drops and no two reactions are the same, like a snowflake. (Another thing that I have not been the least bit successful at but winter is coming fast so I think I will have plenty of chances to try again and curse and cry until I figure that out. Bit of drama here, I know. Although failure may be the thing that teaches us the most, it always hurts my ego. Why can’t it be perfect from the get-go?)
My most recent attempts at the drop conundrum are as follows. A tripod is essential because it is very hard to catch anything that is in motion with a handheld camera. Set your camera in manual mode and have a point of reference to focus on (I use a wooden skewer but I am sure anything else will work too. 🙂 Your ISO really should not be above 400 because your picture will have a lot of noise at much higher. Aperture is dependent on your camera. It can really be anywhere between F10-16 although it is better around 16 if you are using a full-frame camera. Shutter speed is something I have played a lot with just to compare the differences but found that 1/200 seems to works well.
Now that we have all those numbers down, I will have to say that timing is the thing that is probably the hardest thing to nail down. Too soon and you will get just round drops of water in the air before they hit the water. If you snap the shot when it hits the water, all you are left with in a cavity caused by the drop. You really have to wait until it has hit the water to catch the splash back which can be a crown or a column depending on the amount of water in the catch receptacle. You will have the best results of catching something if you snap off a few shots in quick succession.
So with all this information, you are now armed to do battle with the water drop! Try different liquids, vary the amount of liquid in the catch basin, change your shutter speed a bit and see how that affects things. The great thing about DSLR cameras is that everything you do is immediate and you are not spending hundreds of dollars on film. And if your shots are truly terrible, delete them before anyone sees them. Good luck and happy clicking!
–Janice Willson
