Three new self portraits

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Trust me, the water is real! This is a good Summer shoot. Hot in the garage, but the water flying everywhere helped me stay cool.

Here is a shot of my 'studio' I took in the middle of the chaos...

So the routine goes like this...

I set the flashes on manual and dial them down in power. For this shoot I dialed them both to 1/128th power. Low power equals very fast durations which is important for high speed photography.

Before shooting I have to get a pre-focused setting on the camera. So the 'target' you see in the upper-right of the image I swing down into place where the action will be and use auto focus on that. I also use the target to set the exposure for the shot. Once locked on for focus and exposure I switch to manual focus, mark the floor directly below where the target is, then swing the target out of place. This I only do once for all similar shots.

Since the flashes are set low power and need to be there any adjustments for exposure needs to handled by adjusting ISO or aperture, or moving the flashes closer or further from the action. Aperture should be pretty tight for more DOF, I used somewhere between f/11 and f/16.

The microphone to trigger the event is held on top of the flash on the left in this picture. You look close you can see the wire running down to the left to the Stop Shot device.

The Stop Shot I played with different delays ranging from 1 ms to 14 ms depending on what effect I wanted to see.

So to initiate a shot here's the steps...

1. Turn off the lights in the room. (Notice black plastic over the windows) This makes it dark, but there's just enough light to see enough to not trip over things.

2. Open shutter. I use a cable release with camera in bulb mode. This could also be done by just setting a long shutter like 15 to 20 seconds. Most my shots took about 10 - 15 seconds.

3. Grab a water balloon and quietly walk to the 'action' (do not want to trip the audio trigger).

4. Pop balloon. I used a push pin attached to my right thumb by a band-aid (hides it better than tape would have).

5. If audio trigger is set right the flashes trigger.

6. Walk back to cable release and close shutter. If you use long shutter instead and it has not closed yet on it's own, go block the lens with lens cap or similar. The less ambient light in the better.

This should get it. Every shot is different which makes it fun. I evaluate the shot and decide if I want more, or less delay for the next shot. Another thing that matters is how full you fill the balloons. Fill them tight and they pop faster.