365 Challenge #345 - liquid pour and splash!

Further down this blog, I have a bunch of feeds from other photography blogs, and this morning I noticed an interesting post from the peeps at learnmyshot.com about liquid pour and splash photography using continuous lighting. I knew I had those blog feeds there for a reason!

I'm fascinated with high speed water shots, and while this post demonstrated via a video how you could do it with continuous lighting, I decided to use my wireless flash gear. My highly professional set up is shown below (taken on my iPhone) :). Clearly, I jest.

The 5D II + Tamron 90mm macro lens was set up on the tripod, with the FlashWave-III Wireless Radio Slave Receiver. My speedlight flash was tucked in behind the white background (which is a white light tent folded up). I put a white plastic sheet underneath the whole thing to catch any spills, and then placed my glass on an upturned colander to get it above all the plastic. As per the video, it was just a matter of pouring wine/water into the glass, and using a cable release to fire the shutter. Oh...one more thing, it helped immensely that the camera was set to continuous shooting mode.

Then I fiddled with the camera and flash settings until I got an effect I like. For the record, the shot above was taken at f/10, 1/200, ISO 400 set to WB=Flash. I dialled the speedlight down to 1/16 power.

I took a LOT of shots to get a few that I really liked. This was my pick of the bunch (no pun on the grape theme intended). It bugs me slightly in this shot that the white background has a pink tinge - but the red liquid was casting that reflection and there wasn't much I could do about it. Another tip from the guys in the video - if you're using red wine for a shot like this, dilute it with water 50/50 to let more light through.

Anyway, I'm really pleased that I stumbled across the learnmyshot.com post, and had some time to experiment. Gotta love a long weekend.

Now...please pass the wine!

The high tech set up!