Water photography

 

 

How to do it?

Equipment

Don’t use any special camera or lens really. You can use use a Canon 5D and a 180mm macro lens but other equipment work that help to create the drops. One of the basic apparatus is:

Mariotte Siphon

It is called the “Mariotte siphon”. It is well-known to people who do irrigation in rural areas.The head (pressure) is dependent on the height between the bottom of the vertical tube and the final outlet of the liquid. You can build one using a soda bottle, a plastic drinking straw, and epoxy.

Depth of field

There are three things you can do to get more depth of field:

Use a smaller aperture – this requires more light and hazards loss of sharpness due to diffraction

Back up some and crop – you will have a better depth of field, at the expense of resolution.

Camera with a smaller sensor : but these have fewer pixels so you lose resolution

Short lens camera: With this the background is not magnified as much as it is with a long lens, so it appears to be in better focus.

Will my camera work for drop pictures?

It is the most basic question that comes to our mind. Well the answer is any camera will do. You can also use an electronic shutter release to trigger the camera. The technique to create liquid sculpture images is as follows:

1. Create the drop(s), somehow, knowing just when it is released.
2. Wait a specific amount of time.
3. Open the shutter.
4. Wait a bit more.
5. Trigger the flash.
6. Close the shutter.
7. Repeat ad nauseum.

Most modern cameras have a maximum shutter speed of 1/4000th or 1/8000th second. That is fast enough to stop many types of motion like single drop splashing.

 

Water drops are special

Water is a special substance due to few of its properties:

It has the highest surface tension

It has the highest heat capacities of all materials.

It expands (floats) when it freezes.

It is a nearly universal solvent.

The surface tension is responsible for the marvelous splashes. Put a bit of soap in the water and the water drop becomes thin and tall.

The other property of water that is important in determining the shape of water drop splashes is the viscosity. Add glycerin to the water to increase its viscosity.

 

Techniques

Here are the basics:

1) Camera & Lens

use only digital cameras for this work. Take tens of thousands of pictures because one shot will not be enough.

2) Light

Leave the shutter open for a relatively long time (in a darkened room) and use a flash to illuminate the splash. The flash needs to be of a fairly short duration to stop the motion well. Control the amount light output by varying the flash duration. The shorter the duration, the less light .So, you can get a short duration by setting the flash for low power (1/16 or 1/64).

3) Control

The usual means of capturing drops is to release the drop from a dropper and use an electronic circuit to recognize when the drop is in motion, wait for a precise amount of time, and trigger the flash. The important thing is to have a reliable, repeatable method.The timing needs to be accurate to 1/2 millisecond (1/10 millisecond is preferred). Since an average fall time might be 1/2 second, the timing should be accurate to one part in a thousand, or 0.1%.

4) Liquids

They are willfully non-linear. It seems that everything in the world affects how they behave: viscosity, surface tension, density, temperature, the shape of the dropper, and what the cat had for dinner. Learning to control these variables is what demands the patience and creativity.

Increase the viscosity with glycerin (because it doesn’t affect the surface tension much). Use dishwasher rinse aid to reduce the surface tension (because it doesn’t create bubbles, like soap does). 



                                                                                    By Neha Tirthani