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 :-)
- Bucket of water kept under the tap and water dripping slowly and steadily into the bucket (was actually the scene in my case :-P)
- Water in the bucket lighted by a Tungsten bulb in the room (am sure you will have one lighting your room already).
- 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.
