A Better Crowning Water Drop

Learning never stops. Two things happened here to make this water drop crown better than the previous one.

1) The setup
2) Experimenting with the flash.

First the setup:

My husband went to the basement and filled an old metal washtub with water. I bought the washtub on a tag sale for use as a portrait prop.

He set up a sort of table to set it on by placing an old section of countertop across a couple of plastic containers, such as driveway sealer comes in. This gave me a place to work.

He poked a hole in the cover of a soda bottle, filled the bottle with water and hung it over the washtub. The hole it made was a good size, so the drip was quite fast.

Because the last weekly assignment had been about using flash I decided to experiment with my hotshoe flash. I really have not done to much playing with the unit since I got it, and am not very knowledable about it.

When I got the unit, I attached it, set it to fill flash and ADI, and there is where I left it.

Until this night in the basement.

I set the flash unit to 'rear sync flash' and the flash control to 'pre-flash TTL'.

I mounted the camera on the tripod and began shooting. I shot some in the 'normal' fashion and some in continuous mode.

Voila! I could not believe the difference that setting the flash unit on rear sync made! It <em>really</em> froze the movement of drip as the water drop hit the water in the tub! I'm still amazed at the difference it made!

This was shot with a 50mm f2.8 lens. The lens has a switch on the side that you can set to 'limit' for shallow DOF, or 'Full'. I set it to full since I wanted everything in focus.

Camera focusing was set to 'wide area focus', and automatic focus.

Shutter: 1/125
Aperture: 2.8
ISO: 400

You can really see the difference between this one and the prevous shot I posted here.

Ahhh...experimentation and learning holds all kinds of surprises.