Waterdrop Photography - Gary Spicer Photography

I saw a YouTube Video on how to do waterdrop photography, and thought this looks interesting so decided to give it a go. However before I started I looked on Flickr and saw the most amazing images by various photographers.

Maianer - Corrie - Drippy 2009 - Kev Lewis - Keith Trueman - Rifi2 & LindenG got me thinking and when I looked into things it appears lot of these were done with electronic timing devices and high speed flash set ups.

Before I write anymore this guy, Martin Waugh is the master at this type of photography, check out his site 'Liquid Sculpture'

(sorry but for some reason I cannot set the links to some of the photographers mentioned, but I highly recommend you Google them or search them on Flickr)

The water droplets happen so quick that you need to have a flashgun set on low power in a darkened room for best results. A Canon 580EX II on 1/64 of its normal power emits a flash of light that is approximately 1/30,000 second in duration, these are the kind of speeds required to catch a water droplet.

So this led me on to a company in America called 'Cognysis' and a product called 'StopShot'.

This is a highly sophisticated timing device, electronic watervalve and infrared sensor beam.

I would highly recommend you follow the link to their website, its fascinating if you like this kind of thing!

Its not cheap, but $1,000 later courtesy of Fed-Ex my gear arrived.

I have posted a few images here of what I have acheived to date and will write more about what I learn in the coming weeks...

This the 1st set of images from the StopShot setup, really struggled with the flash setup, hence the dark areas. This set up was exactly how the example is in the user manual..

I have messed around with the setup a lot, and the following images are where I am at present, very much at the beginning with a lot to learn yet!

A short summary of what I have set up so far.

Stop Shot used and set up with the black end of the release valve just 268mm above the water surface, the water in a black 12 '' paint tray. The IR beam is 85mm below the tip of the drip valve. canon 1ds M2 with 180mm macro ½ sec (bulb - time of shutter controlled by stop shot) @ f29 ISO 100. The camera eyepiece was 1200mm from the floor and 750mm from the drop zone. StopShot as follows - T1 Manual 1, T2 75m/s and T3 146m/s. T1 Config was ♯ Pulse 2 -Pulse 1 15 m/s Toff 115m/s. T2 Config Pulse 1 500m/s (½ sec shutter speed) Toff 100m/s.

These settings gave some pretty good results and all the images below came from this. I did find that the level of water in the Marriot Siphon had an impact on what was produced.