Taking photos of water drops

Canon EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm f/3.5 EX APO Macro HSM, 1/200 f/9, iso 400, tripod, Canon 580 EX flash. Piacenza, Italy.

Water drops had been photographed thoushands of times, but they are always a cool subject. With a flash, you can freeze the motion of the water, to create fascinating water sculptures. This kind of photos is not too difficult, but it takes a bit of preparation. The first thing to do is to set the camera on the right parameters: RAW file format, M exposure, manual focus. In M mode, I set the aperture on f/8, f/11 or f/16, and the shutter speed on 1/250, that is the x-sync of my 20D. It is important to select the x-sync because you need to exclude the ambient light from the photo; the only source of light must be the flash. Other than that, I recommend to take these photos in a relatively dark room. I've used ISO 400 to get a faster flash - at lower ISO, the flash may no be fast enough to freeze the motion; anyway, this kind of subject don't have textures, so you can use a pretty strong noise reduction to get perfectly clean images.

The next step is to create the set-up for the photos, that is shown in the following illustration.

I've mounted the camera on my Manfrotto 190MF4 tripod, and I accurately focussed - of course with manual focus - on the water drops. Since it is difficult to predict the exact point where the drop will fall, I've left some empty room in the composition, and I cropped all the photos to the perfect composition during post-processing. The shower must gives a regular flow of drops - I open it just enough to get a drop every 1-2 seconds. The camera was as low as possible on the water surface, to create a better pespective and to frame the drops against a clean, out of focus background. I used the Sigma 180mm macro lens to have a good working distance, and I placed a blue card into background.

Even though it is possible to get good results even with the in-camera flash (as far as you stay close to the subject), to get the best results I suggest to use a powerful flash as the Canon 580 EX. You can mount the flash on the hot shoe - even though it gives a strong, direct light, the water is transparent so the photos looks like they were taken in nice diffused light. Now, you just have to take a lot of shots! Usually, if you have created a good set-up, you will get a good photo every 15-20 shots. Check the histogram to be sure that the photos are well exposed (if there are over or under-exposed, change the flash exposure compensation), and check the sharpness with the magnification tool.

The last step is post processing: it is quite simple, but you can be creative. I did the main adjustments of contrast, noise reduction and cropping, then I've used the color balance tool to create the color that I like - here I've choosen an intense blue, but I could have make it even red, green or every other color. Since this is a studio photo, not a natural history image, you can be as creative as you want with colors and post processing :-) With the layer mask, I've given a slight warm color to the reflection of the flash, that stands out well from the cold tones of the whole photo.

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