Water Drops Part 2

I was so happy to see that Ashley and Sarah chose my Water Drop tutorial for Tutorial Tuesday.  I've been wanting to try it again anyways, using what I learned to improve, and this gave me the perfect excuse.

I've been having so much fun see everyone try my water drops.  I have a few extra tips to share.  First, if you haven't already, check out my first Water Drop Tutorial.

The one thing I didn't like from my first attempt is that when I got the pattern to show up in the water drop in focus, then the outside of the water drop was blurry.  I wanted both in focus! So this time I shut my aperture down all the way to f/16 in order to get both the water and the pattern in focus.  Of course by doing this, the background fabric isn't as blurred out, but because I used a macro lens and macro lenses have extremely shallow depth of field, it still worked. It was blurred out enough for me.

This background is actually one of my sun dresses draped over the back of the sink! I shot these at f/14, using a Nikon 85mm f/3.5 Macro Lens

Because I was shooting with such a small aperture, a low ISO, and a fairly fast shutter speed (around 1/200 I think) a flash was absolutely essential! The exposure on my camera would have left me with a solid black photo so I used the manual settings on my flash to control my exposure.

I closed down to f/16 for the rest of these shots. You can definitely see more of the background show up, but I don't mind it.

To take these, I autofocused right where the water was coming out of the sink, and when the camera focused, I flipped to manual focus without moving my camera (a tripod would've been SO helpful, but it didn't fit close enough to my sink as I needed) and with my focus and exposure both locked off, I could hold down the shutter and take as many photos in quick succession as my camera would allow! With fresh batteries, my flash can fire about 6 or 7 times in quick bursts. My batteries weren't as fresh this time so I was only getting about 4 flashes, but still helpful to catch the water drops!

This background is a fabric scrap I picked up at the fabric store.








I love that the closed down aperture allows the edge of the water and the pattern inside it to be nicely focused.

Lastly, I grabbed a gift bag I had lying around from a birthday. I liked the bright diamond pattern. I propped the gift bag up behind the water drip. Also, I tried increasing the speed of the water dripping from my faucet. To the naked eye it looked like a steady stream instead of a drip, but my camera was still able to catch drops I couldn't even see, and this helped with timing.

I love how these came out! The one thing I didn't anticipate is that it was a shiny background instead of fabric which caused the flash to reflect off the background at certain angles. I changed angles to help minimize this...and also masked a bit of the glare out in Photoshop! :)

These are my favorites!










I love this last one the best!








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This is the perfect thing to play around with when stuck inside on a cloudy or rainy day, or when you're home at night--because you don't need any natural light to get this affect!  Check out Tutorial Tuesday to see other water drop shots!

And don't forget to come back here on Tuesday's as well for my Tips & Pics link up!

Click to see my PULLBACK SHOT for these pics.