A Scenic World

Yesterday while browsing the net, I came across some water droplet photos. You know the kind – wonderfully sharp, perfect outlines of the drops, beautiful colors in the background. I thought back to a memorable afternoon in my old apartment, right after I got my first DSLR, when I let water drip into a pot for hours and tried to get shots. Without a doubt, that venture was a failure. But surely I’ve learned a bit more about photography since then, right?

Right?

Things I learned today:

• an off-camera flash is not a necessity, but it sure makes thing easier
• I don’t need a fancy hot-shoe adapter to attach my flash to my spare tripod; the flash worked best placed sideways on a book
• milk stains granite

Allow me to explain. I started out with a bowl of water in a fancy bowl Jens bought me for my birthday. I had the flash on its fancy hot-shoe adapter, attached to my spare tripod, pointed down toward the bowl at an angle. I attempted manual focus. This is the best I got:

Part of my problem was that I was not delivering the water in a methodical way. I just kept dipping a paper towel into another bowl and then squeezing it over the bowl (I had the end of the towel turned to a point). I improvised a system by borrowing this granite picture-holder thingy of Jens’ that had long metal arms sticking out of it to hold the photos. I put one of these over my fancy bowl then took off the shoestring of my shoe and tied one end to the picture-holder. Perfect! Now I just squeezed the water over the shoestring, and it dropped perfectly each time. Still, this water wasn’t that awesome. I’d heard that oil is interesting to work with, so I added a layer of vegetable oil.

Oh, God, no. Now it just looked like a goopy mess, which is WAS. I washed out the bowl and decided to try some milk. Unfortunately it meant I was going to have to waste a lot of milk, but hey, it’s for art!

Focusing was still the hardest thing to do. The bowl reflected any lights on in the apartment, so I basically sat in the dark and tried to focus with my right hand while my left dripped milk on to the shoelace with my only source of light the bright flashes from my onboard and external flashes when I tripped the shutter.

I found that the best method was to allow an almost steady stream of liquid to flow down and right as it tapered off to snap like crazy. I tripped the shutter by hand and with a remote, and honestly I didn’t notice a different in the rate of keepers. Both resulted in almost none.

Of course, sometimes you ended up with too many drops in the photo:

As I said, the attrition rate was insane. I shot something like 683 photos today; about 30 were keepers. A lot of them were just bizarre-looking landscapes like this:

Of course, even that’s better than what most were…..

…which is nothing at all:

Still, it wasn’t a total failure. In fact, some of these I even like! You can see the entire set by clicking here, or you can just look at this one:

By the way, I made an incredible mess, and milk DOES stain granite, or at least it leaves a weird residue. Also, my shoelace now feels a little crusty, even after I let it soak in soapy water for a while.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Photography Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.