Fast Shutter

For Exercise 3.1 I had a couple of ideas in mind – I have a nice little wildlife pond that the birds love to drink and bathe in and thought I’d try and get one of them shaking about in the water. The trouble is that to take them at a decent angle I have to either be in camouflage (which I haven’t got – which is lucky for me as my wife and daughter would have ridiculed me then posted pics of me on facebook for all my friends to laugh at) or sit dead still for ages with lens poised hoping for a shot – hmmm – OR I could try remotely connecting to the camera via my phone and take images that way. Trouble is the bluetooth connection worked for about ten feet and the app kept crashing. Last resort – set up the camera in the pond and set up the inveloceraptor (I know) built in to the camera to take a shit load of images one after the other in the vain hope of getting something in focus in the right area. 4000 images later I had about 4 worth looking at. If I wanted a bird shot I’d have to do what wildlife photographers have been doing for years and just wait and be patient. Hmmm again.

Or, OR I could go with plan b – self portrait taken just as two buckets of water are thrown at me from either side – the idea being to use a flash so the image looks dark (a bit like DiCorcia’s ‘Head’s Images but moister. Ah shame the weather turned – have to go indoors.

If it’s indoors then I’ll have to try a Milk Drop Coronet homage. A good excuse to use the high speed flash sync. A doddle surely. Pffftt. About 1000 attempts later I probably had a dozen shots that are ok. I found it addictive but I had a load of problems during the shoot.

Firstly – Banding – visible horizontal lines. I’d come across this before about a decade ago when I had some old studio lights and knew it was an issue with shutter speed and flash synchronisation but my new flash was supposed to be able to sync upto 1/8000. After buggering around with the flash I couldn’t find anything wrong so tried the camera settings (well googled banding and the camera) and hey presto I needed to turn the shutter to mechanical and turn the electronic curtain off in the settings – ofcourse, how foolish of me. Banding issue solved – or so I thought. After taken the first 500 images and only having a cursory look at the back of the camera I had a closer look – eh? still looks like a bit of banding?! Uploading to the computer only confirmed what I already knew but it didn’t seem to be on all of them. For some reason the manual focus macro lens was the problem. Experimenting allowed me to go to around 1/4000 with this lens whereas my 28-75 lens would happily go to 1/8000 with no banding. Christ knows why but I bet it’s to do with the manual lens not having electronic contacts. It’s a shame as the macro got much more intimate looking shots.

Here are two examples – banding is clearly visible on both image s which were taken at 1/8000

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Anyway if in doubt do some googling.

Dag-bloody-nabbit. I was doing it wrong.

Turns out that for this kind of photography the shutter speed of the camera is pretty irrelevant – it’s the flash thats critical, and more importantly the flash’s ability to fire at lower power resulting in a quicker burst and thereby capturing the high speed action (in theory – depends if you timed the shutter release correctly)

Ok then lets see – set flash to low power. Check. Set shutter speed of camera to 1/250. Check. Manually dangle pipette whilst holding remote shutter cable. All very Heath Robinson.

Hey presto. This worked – kind of. It took a while to get the hang of it but the low power flash meant I could fire away to my hearts content where as previously the flash power must have been near on full (set to TTL) because of the 1/8000 shutter.

A bit more googling and I changed the water bath set up so that one dish full to the brim was sitting in another dish to try and give an infinite pool look. Rather than trying to time the drops I was happily dripping away and firing multiple shots which did result in some interesting splashes but perhaps too much surface movement.

I was getting addicted to this.

I then discovered a boys toy which I am tempted to buy – Splash Art kit. This electronically triggers drops of different sizes so that you can smash one drop into the other just at the highest point of the first drops worthington jet (get me – thats what the worm that forms from a drop is called).

This way you get results like this….NOT MINE!

https://500px.com/embed.js

To see how it works in slow motion this video demonstrates….

Fascinating stuff.

Anyway the temptation to spend more money is parked for a bit. I achieved one double drop splash by random chance but it was far too messy. In the end I was quite happy with the best images and know if I spent a bit more time and effort on playing with shutter speed settings and more importantly a consistent drop using some lab equipment I’d get better results.

Here are a couple of images – I started to see people or other creatures after a while – weird. I’ll post the best ones with 3.1 in the Exercise Section.

Thanks

Bibliography

First Man Photography (2017) Water Drop Photography | EVERY STEP from start to print. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zUA7DUQl_c (Accessed 06/06/2020).

High Speed Photography Ltd (s.d.) At: https://www.phototrigger.co.uk/ (Accessed 06/06/2020).

Flickr (2016.) At: https://www.flickr.com/photos/69294818@N07/24959834343/ (Accessed 08/06/2020).