Water Drops with D800

It's a gloomy Sunday here, so I got this idea from Googling "Rainy Day Indoor Photography Ideas." To give you a sense of scale, the water drop is coming out of a standard eye-dropper. New (to me) D800 with the Nikon 105mm 2.8 macro prime and a Mecablitz speedlight on-camera pointed directly at the subject. The detail from the D800 is really impressive. Note the last shot that is a "dust on the water" detail from the first shot.

I like that. The dust is cool.

I just realized I didn't level the shots in editing...

Those are awesome. I almost ready to give this a try.

I sure will give that a try next time it's bad weather. That looks really nice.

I was trying a few shots like this yesterday, just with the 50mm lens, not as good as blade canyon, but will keep practicing.

Nice!

It's fun to do this kind of Photography Special on bad weather days

Nice series Blade Canyon - you're giving me ideas. My 24-70 f2.8 should work, I can get to within 12 inches to focus. Why is your shutter speed on all showing 10/2500 - don't you mean 1/2500s ?

Bunsen Honeydew said:

Why is your shutter speed on all showing 10/2500 - don't you mean 1/2500s ?

Click to expand...

Nope, it's 1/250th of a second (using a flash). I don't know why the EXIF shows it as a 10/2500 instead of 1/250th.

The flash is what froze the action, not the shutter speed.

Okay, 1/250th makes more sense with flash. Thanks.

Actually I guess 10/2500 is the same as 1/250, I've just never thought of expressing it that way !

Just out of curiosity, how did you synchronize the shutter & the dropper, just trial & error ?

Bunsen Honeydew said:

Just out of curiosity, how did you synchronize the shutter & the dropper, just trial & error ?

Click to expand...

Yes, trial and error. I have lots of pics of flat water. I stood behind the camera, held the dropper at arm's length as high as possible in front of me, then would hit the shutter pretty much as soon as I saw the drop leave the glass dropper.

Set the lens on manual focus and put something in the water to set your focus ahead of time. I used a clothespin. The water was in a pyrex baking dish on the kitchen counter. Camera was on a tripod shooting across the water.

Thanks for the info - something to do next week once all the holiday stuff is over. If I get anything decent, I'll post it here. Might try some food colouring in the dropper into clear water in the bowl.

I gave it a try with my cam. It's the first run and since, as probably expected, I don't use flash, I need to fine-tune quite a lot. Pretty hard to get enough in focus with the macro. I might better take more distance. I took the easy path and poured some water. There's no use in drops when that doesn't work.

A couple of different attempts:

Thanks for posting this, it has given me some great ideas.

I tried water drops a few years ago. Rather than a dropper, I filled a ziplock baggie with water and punched a small hole in it to allow a constant drip into a black paint pan. That freed me up to focus on the shot. I used flashes and a macro lens as well as some colored backgrounds. I found that it takes a lot of shots to get some good ones and that you can add some color in post as well as crop to taste. For example:

Love that last one, Jim.