Lamp Shade (Water Drop)

High speed capture. Water 'pool' in a cookie sheet on my kitchen table.

Interesting shot!

I really like this, especially the 'zebra stripes'.

Dynamite picture. What's the set up?

Setup is a cookie sheet for the pool. Two speelites shooting from back to front (toward the camera) shooting through a blue gel (I used a translucent blue cheap notebook folder) with a striped notebook page separator stacked on it (clear with opaque white stripes from office max). Then one speedlite shot through a yellow gel shooting about 90 degrees to the drop from the camera angle. The angle of the flashes to the pool relative to the camera angle is very sensitive and very important to get the lighting/reflections/r​efractions just right. Tiny adjustments make for big differences here.
I use a Stop Shot dropper system to dial in the timing and use it to trigger my Pocket Wizard transmitter which trips the flashes. So this is shot in a darkened room, camera on tripod, open shutter, trip the electronic water dropper to start the event, water drop passes by IR light beam which starts the timer which in turn trips the Pocket Wizard, flashes set at 1/128th power for quicker burst of light go off, then I close the shutter. I use a cable release to manually lock the shutter open and then manually close it.
In this particular shot I 'disturbed' the water surface just a little bit before triggering the event which is what caused the stripes reflections to be a bit wavy.

Dermit wrote in post #17663316
Setup is a cookie sheet for the pool. Two speelites shooting from back to front (toward the camera) shooting through a blue gel (I used a translucent blue cheap notebook folder) with a striped notebook page separator stacked on it (clear with opaque white stripes from office max). Then one speedlite shot through a yellow gel shooting about 90 degrees to the drop from the camera angle. The angle of the flashes to the pool relative to the camera angle is very sensitive and very important to get the lighting/reflections/r​efractions just right. Tiny adjustments make for big differences here.
I use a Stop Shot dropper system to dial in the timing and use it to trigger my Pocket Wizard transmitter which trips the flashes. So this is shot in a darkened room, camera on tripod, open shutter, trip the electronic water dropper to start the event, water drop passes by IR light beam which starts the timer which in turn trips the Pocket Wizard, flashes set at 1/128th power for quicker burst of light go off, then I close the shutter. I use a cable release to manually lock the shutter open and then manually close it.
In this particular shot I 'disturbed' the water surface just a little bit before triggering the event which is what caused the stripes reflections to be a bit wavy.

totally awesome man. thanks for describing. i've seen quite a few of these.... but i think this is the most beautiful i've seen so far! so much complexity to the image, and symmetry at the same time. you even got some lighting on the surface of the "lamp shade"! love it.

Xyclopx wrote in post #17673009
totally awesome man. thanks for describing. i've seen quite a few of these.... but i think this is the most beautiful i've seen so far! so much complexity to the image, and symmetry at the same time. you even got some lighting on the surface of the "lamp shade"! love it.

Thank you for the comments. I am looking forward to doing more of these real soon now that I just got my 5DS R. Looking forward to seeing these with higher resolution and with my new-ish 100mm macro. The shot here, if I remember right, was shot with my 70-200 at quite a distance away and cropped way in. So the high res with macro right on top of the action I am hoping will pull out even more details. We shall see.

Nice shot, looks like a fountain. And thanks for the "how-to", another piece of knowledge!