Ideas: Water Splashes

Water splashes are a simple and fun way to try high speed photography at home. Be as creative as you can by mixing colours and liquids, you can some awesome effects.

So I decided to try taking some more photos of water droplets and splashes. To do this, I basically just set up two wireless flashes near my glass of water. I used two because I used a colour gel on one to give the water drops a splash of colour. I set my camera up on a tripod and used a remote release to try and ensure everything was sharp and in focus. I used a pretty small aperture to try and keep everything in focus.

My flashes were set to manual power at 1 /16, this was to ensure that they could fire multiple times to match the camera's burst mode but also to ensure a short flash duration which is essential to freezing fast movement. As you may or may not know, lower powers mean shorter flash duration. I placed my glass of water on a towel and put an old white folder behind it to serve as a background. At first I just tipped water out of my water bottle but then I decided to drop some glass marbles in the water instead to give bigger splashes. I probably shouldn't have done that since I actually broke the glass from dropping marbles on it. So ... be careful.

Anyway, here are some of the shots I managed to get. As you can see, it can look pretty cool and not necessarily very hard to set up. You can do this with one flash instead of two and place the flash on camera in case you don't have wireless triggers. You can use food colouring instead of gels, but this will give you a slightly different look, but is worth experimenting with anyway.