Shooting Water Droplets.

[Michael_Lambert]

How are you guys doing it?

I was messing around yesterday trying to shoot some and for the life of me i can not get a single shot to turn out.

I setup a Doser so that it auto drops the water the same amount each time every 10 seconds or so I also took a penny and held it in place where the water droplets would hit and manually focused using my 100mm Macro and then tried getting of shots.

I guess typing this out the secret most of you use is Continuous lighting? Cause i just can not get the timing down using my flash or strobes.

[jgrussell]

Patience, persistence, perseverance. If at first (or the first 10,000 times) you don't succeed, keep trying. Seriously, I probably shot off 400 or more shots to get a handful that I liked including this one (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=652326).

I used my regular flash (420EX), tripod, manual focus (on a screw in the direct line of the water drop), and just kept shooting. If I got 1 in 200 that I was satisfied with, it was a lot. So, patience, persistence, perseverance. You'll get the shot you want.

[dima1109]

I hung up a plastic bag with water on the hook on the bottom of the center column on my tripod, poked a hole in it, put a tray underneath, and shot (don't have pictures of the setup, it was late). I've discovered that unless you have a precise system that drops the drops in exactly the same spot every time, it's better to handhold the camera. It's much easier to move the camera to where the drop would be in focus than to try to drop the water exactly in the focus plane of a camera set up on a tripod.

I would say you will probably shoot ~200 shots before you start getting results that look decent on the camera display, and ~500 before you start getting keepers. I shot a total of about 1300 shots, and 30 of them were good enough.