To Catch a Falling Drop
Water Drop...Catch It If You Can
Water Drop
What do you do on a rainy day? You do something challenging that’s what.
Our challenge started on a Saturday morning, when Dawn, myself and my photo friend--Rob Miller (from www.rellimphotos.com )--were supposed to take engagement pictures of Emily and Daniel at a nearby park.
Well the first thing that went wrong was that in the morning when we got up Dawn got sick and the second thing was that we turned on the news and saw that a storm was moving in.
The photo shoot was scheduled for 11:30 am, but we called and the couple could make it an a little earlier, and the sky was still cooperating with us, so we went for it. Rob was already on his way over to have breakfast anyway.
We all, except for our model wrangler--Dawn--met up at the park at 10:00 am and got started taking pictures at a faster pace then normal. I was the lead shooter and Rob was my trusty everything else, and he did a great job (when we help Rob it is the other way around, except for the “great job” part as Dawn is generally quitting or getting fired after every shoot...inside joke).
About 11:05 am we changed locations to a wooded area of the park and continued shooting. It was a little farther away from the vehicles, more on that later. At about 11:25 am we heard the raindrops on the leaves of the tress, and I took one last shot, which ended up being one of my favorites of the shoot.
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Then we started frantically packing things up, I told Emily and Daniel to just go straight to their car and not bother to help carry anything as Rob and I would get it. Rob took his load out first while I was still breaking down things and putting them in bags. I told him to just drive his truck back to where were were and we would finish loading that way. He never came back, so I started walking out of the woods when I heard a car pull up behind me and it was Emily and Daniel to my rescue! I loaded all the equipment into their car and sent them to the parking lot. I went on foot and found Rob running back to me. He looked surprised when he saw me empty handed. I asked him where was his truck, and he replied that he did not want to risk getting a ticket driving in the park. I muttered something under my breath and laughed, I might not have risked it either, except that my father had been to this park earlier in the year to do some work on the river running through it and I knew you could drive back to where we were. I ended up telling him that Emily and Daniel drove back and got the equipment. Then we started back to the parking lot, by the time we got there our equipment was waiting for us all nice and dry and we were soaked!
Rob and I drove back to my house and dried off and grabbed something to drink and snack on. As we nibbled we watched out the window as the storm rolled in and really started to let loose, good thing we got out when we did!
As we nibbled at watched the storm, we decided that any chance of taking pictures outside the rest of the day was doomed. So, we decided to take pictures inside. At first we were going to take pictures of smoke, but Dawn put her foot down and said no way since in her queasy state she did not want to smell anything that might make here stomach upset. We agreed and then thought that water might be a good idea (must have been the subliminal message from outside the window).
Rob got out his strob (flash) and camera and I got my tripod and a bowl. We tried several things to actually make a drop of water starting with a turkey baster, then a spoon, a bag with a tiny hole in it, a mellon baller, a bigger spoon, but nothing would make the water drop big enough for us to use. Since we did not have a macro lens handy just the 200 and 300 mm zoom lenses we were at a disadvantage. In the end Rob discovered that if he used a wet paper towel it would create a large enough drop of water for us to use.
Since we did not have anything to make a black background Rob decided just to use a large F stop, he selected an F22, which would render the background completely black. This would also give us some play in our depth of field since we were going to hand hold the paper towel and did not have a way of making the position the same for each shot!
The next step was to actually capture the falling water drop. This is where the strobe or flash plays an important part. Our shutter speed was only 200 not fast enough to stop a falling water drop in mid air but it was the fastest we could go with when using the strobe light. However, that was OK since we were using a strobe light. The flash of the light would actually freeze the fast action for us regardless of our relatively long shutter speed.
We started the process of capturing the drop by having one of us do the dropping and the other one trying to hit the shutter release button at the exact time the drop was in front of the lens and strobe light. Not an easy thing to do!! We took turns dropping and catching and ended up getting some good candidates. however we noticed that they were still a little blurry, which meant we just were not stopping the action fast enough. We both thought about this and surmised that we needed to use the smallest power setting on the strobe (flash) that we could. By doing so, the actual time that the flash was “on” was the shortest time. This worked but then we had the issue of not having enough light. So, back to the drawing board. Our simple solution was to just double the light by adding a second strobe. We rubber banded two units together and started dropping water again.
With our new lighting arrangement, we got some good results. One was so good we could see the knuckles of the hand dropping the water. This instantly gave us the idea that we could write a message in the drop of water! Great, another challenge! Oh, what the heck, we had all afternoon as it was still raining!
What message to put in the water drop? Rob and I both thought that putting the word: “STROBIST” in would be befitting. The website www.strobist.com is a website all about using small camera flash units (also called strobes) instead of large studio strobe lights. Again, this was brilliant! Then again, it might have been the quantity of beer that we had consumed by this point clouding our thoughts! I hand wrote the words and we tested it and discovered that we needed to make a slight modification. I then printed up a page that had the word “TSIBORTS” written backwards because I took an educated guess that the drop of water would act like a lens and reverse the lettering, and I was pleasantly correct. So back we went to capture a water drop but now with words in it that we could read.
We kept dropping water and hitting the shutter release and finally got one that was a keeper and that is what you see at the top of this BLOG entry.
Below are some pictures of how we set things up. Rob is in Orange and I am in my Red Indiana University Hockey shirt.
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