Capturing a Water Drop

The 5 minute tutorial!

Materials required-

A bucket full of water, a tripod(optional), a camera (Preferably SLR) with manual focus and flash. Oh and yea, if you ever paid attention to the kinematics classes in school (!!), it won’t take more than a few minutes to master this technique!

Arrangement

Place the bucket at shown in the picture (here I used another empty bucket placed upside down underneath it so I don't have to bend down to see through the view finder, and also so that I could easily fix and use the tripod)

Remember to shoot at an angle to the background, otherwise the result will be something like-

Focus

This is a very important step. To focus your camera to produce crystal clear pictures, keep a pen where the water drops are falling at about 1cm above the water level, and focus. Most photographers suggest manual focus in this but I preferred focusing automatically first and then manually making minor adjustments. Once you have your focus, don’t swap to AF mode, otherwise your camera will get confused and de-focus it! (yes, camera’s are dumb!)

Camera Settings

Always have the flash on (unless you have very strong studio-like artificial light). On most cameras this will limit your shutter speed to 1/200s, which I found adequate. But if you can have strong artificial light sources, I’d suggest going for a 1/500s shutter speed. This will give you a crystal clear image, usable for large blow ups! Aperture also has to be small. I shot these at f/13, but anything above f/9 will work (if you have smaller aperture don’t stick to f/9. That is for cameras which don’t feature smaller apertures!). If the camera you use doesn’t have that small an aperture control, worry not! With the shutter speed at 1/200 and the ISO at 50-100, pleasing results can be had.

Once all of the above is achieved, you’re all set to go… well.. almost!

The most important step in capturing a water drop is eventually timing. Ever wondered why they taught you those three equations of motion? Well, if you really learnt them back in high school, put yourself to a test!

Basically, when you’ve setup the camera, stop looking through the viewfinder. Fix your composition, take a few test shots and then just back off from the view finder and observe the water drop. If you have the shutter speed at 1/200, you’ll probably be fine clicking when the drop is about half way through its journey (Kinematics=3/4th the time of the journey)

Once check to be made so you don’t scream over hundreds of out of focus pictures is the hand test. I happened to click 66 pictures out of focus, which looked pretty neat on the camera’s screen, but were useless when expanded on my computer, like the one below..

To fix this, place your hand right behind to the falling water drop (not touching)and click a picture of the drop. See closely and ensure that your hand is OUT OF FOCUS. A droplet is roughly 0.5-1cm thick and even a very small focus fault can leave you nowhere.

Time to Shoot!

Now that you have everything in place, click according to your will!! There are many phases of a falling drop, and many more angles at which you can capture them (Warning:Don’t go more than 45 degrees vertical or you’ll see small scattered flashes in the middle of your drop, like in the one below).

Experiment with your composition, use different colored buckets for different colored drops. You can use a variety of backgrounds too. Try blowing the drop when its falling to give a breezy effect. And, if you’re insane like me, put an iron grind blend of water in a plastic bag, make a pin-hole in the bag, and use a magnet to pull the small grains of iron just before they splash! Photography is all about thinking differently, and if you can think it, you can do it!

Do share your experiences with water shooting!!

Keep Clicking,
Arjun