Splish Splash Splatter

Shooting water droplets is something that I wanted to do for a long time now. But given the fact that I don't have a minimal required setup like external flash or quality macro lens, this subject remained in my "want-to-do" list for a long time now.

Yesterday there was no water supply in my appartment (thanks to the dry summer and yet to come monsoon) and water just started to drip from the tap. Suddenly I got this idea of photographing the droplets! But how? without a macro lens and external flash? Well, I thought I'll give a try with my telephoto lens (at maximum zoom) and my internal (camera's in-built) flash.

My zero-costly, zero-fancy setup is quiet simple ... well in my case the scene was already set for me :-)

1. Bucket of water kept under the tap and water dripping slowly and steadily into the bucket (was actually the scene in my case :-P)
2. Water in the bucket lighted by a Tungsten bulb in the room (am sure you will have one lighting your room already).
3. My camera fitted with a telephoto lens (Canon 55-250mm) at 250mm zoom mounted in a tripod for steady focus (don't expect me to lend my camera or lens :P).

Seriously that's it for my setup! Now coming to the execution part ...

Using camera's auto-focus I focussed the point where the droplet was hitting the water in the bucket (by keeping a pencil at that point) . Once the focus was set properly, I switched the lens to manual-focus. I set the camera to shutterpriority mode (Tv) with a shutter speed of 1/200 seconds and to burst in continous mode. With camera's inbuilt flash on and ready, I was ready to click the droplets in no time.

After some trial and error attempts I got hold of the timing of the droplets fall and started to record some falling droplets. Here are some of the shots from my first attempt to capture "more-closeup-than-macro-water droplets". Colors obtained here are using differnt whitelight balance settings in my camera. I am planning to experiment more with lighting and colors later during the weekend. Till then enjoy these macro-of-droplets and feel free to comment/provide feedback.

Blue tornado

Balancing in the needle end

Exclamation mark!

A droplet figurine

Splish, splash and splatter

Ball on the bottle top

Note: Of course my setup is very limited or perhaps not qualified as even one :P. If you have access to a good quality macro lens, better lighting and external flash (speedlite or equivalent versions), you can get stunning macros of droplets.