Hey folks! This week in YAA’s Perspective series, we’re going to stop time. Yeah, that’s right! All we need is a camera and a little bit of ingenuity. 🙂
To explain the project to you, it’s pretty simple. We’re going to take a picture of a falling drop of water so fast that there’s no blur in the picture, and it seems like it’s just floating there!
A quick heads up and warning before we start: Remember, electronics and water don’t mix. Camera + a nice bath = BAD. Please be careful if you decide to try this!
Ready? Ready!
Equipment you’ll need:
- Camera. You’ll need to be able to set the ISO and Shutter speed manually. The ISO will have to go up to about 400 and the shutter speed to 1/2000ths of a second
- Tripod, or some other crazy camera support device of you own imagining.
- A piece of white, letter sized paper
- A paper towel or two
- A sink
- LOTS of lights!
Step 1: Make a cheap flash diffuser
- Take your piece of paper and fold it in half.
- Now fold it in half the other way.
- You should now have a squarish-rectangle of paper 1/4 the size of the original.
- Take the two corners on one of the small sides of the rectangle and pinch them together.
- It should have a conical shape now. Staple the two corners together, and there you have it! Your very own, free flash diffuser!
“Wait wait wait!” you say. “What’s this for?” Well, you take the circular opening in your paper and stick it on top of your flash. This direct all the light towards your subject, and softens the light a little as well. It should look something like this:
Silly me, mine’s placed poorly… You should angle it farther forward than I did, otherwise you’ll get a dark line though your picture where the paper covered the flash.
Step 2: Set up for the shot
- This one’s mainly up to you, but here are a few pointers:
- Turn on the tap to a medium drip. This way you know where to put your camera without giving it a wash.
- Fold your paper towel and put it right where the water drops land. This stops the water from slashing back up onto your camera.
- Set up your camera on a tripod/awesome contraption so that the lens in VERY close to the trickle of water, ie: between 1cm and 4cm, depending on how close your camera can focus. The idea here is to make the water droplets sharp and the background all blurred out.
- Surround your sink with lights. Lots of them! When you’re shooting at speeds like 1/2000ths a second (any slower and the drops start to blur), very little light gets through to the image sensor, so we have to give it as much as possible to get a nice, sharp picture without having to boost the ISO too much.
Here’s what my set-up looked like:
Step 3: Ready, Aim, Fire!
- Make sure your flash is turned on, and you have your diffuser attached.
- Once you have your shutter at the fastest it’ll go, play with your aperture and and ISO to get the best brightness. Try this: Make the aperture as big as possible (remember, bigger aperture = smaller f-stop. My camera only went down to f5.2 at that shutter speed, but some will go to 1.3 or even lower). Then, raise your ISO until you can clearly see the picture.
- Make sure the tap is at a medium-fast drip, otherwise you’ll spend an agonizing amount of time trying to press the shutter just as the drop falls. It’s just easier to have more falling at once and you can just click whenever.
- Keep shooting until you get a good one! It really shouldn’t take too long 🙂
One of my captures:
(Another tip: If you share your picture online, always tag them with the details of how you shot them so other people can try the same)
Like so –
Camera: Nikon P6000
F-stop: f/5.2
Exposure time: 1/2000 sec.
Exposure compensation: 0 steps
Flash: On/Fill flash
If this really interests you, check out this guy. He’s built himself an amazing high-speed camera rig with a laser triggered shutter so he always gets the perfect shot! If you REALLY like it and want to see more, check out his Flickr galleries here and here.
Have any burning questions or comments? Feel free to use the comments section below!