There are a few people taking fantastic water drop/high speed shots on the site (IreneM first springs to mind of course but there are many others). There are a few ways to achieve this and I was wondering if many of you are using timers or just by eye. So I was hoping you could share some of you equipment to help others.
I've had a couple of attempts at this so I'll start by sharing my bumbling ways.
First I start by just dropping stuff in liquid trying to get the right point by eye. Very few keepers (1:50 maybe), also the shallow focus and the randomness of the dropping meant a lot of out of focus shots. I have 2 entries with this method:
Next I built a little circuit following some plans I found at HiViz for a photogate timer. This was a lot more consistent, and I could set the focus point a lot better. I found it hard to adjust the timing just right. But I got this entry which I don't think I could have gotten without a timer:
My current project is to use an Arduino, which is a programmable processor chip on a board. The pic below show the setup connected to a remote shutter release and a remote flash trigger. The yellow board is the HiViz circuit mentioned above that I used the photogate trigger part for this. Basically this has a little menu that lets me select shutter open, delay in milliseconds, and can control more than one flash. As you can see its a bit of a work in progress, still a lot of playing a couple of bugs but it does work. I like the idea of this, I can use it for anything I want to trigger the camera or flash automatically; sound, time lapse, lightning even combined with motors to move the camera, the possibilities are endless.
I do all my water drop shots without timers or gizmos. My eye hand coordination is all that's needed. I'll post some shots later tonight in this thread.
I'd like to find something like what you're doing. If I'm going for something in particular it could take as many as 500 shots to get. Yeah, hand/eye timed shots are possible, but I'd like to spend my time doing other things too.
Some lovely shots there guys, done by hand too!
Maybe I'm the only one playing with timers, but then again I'm a nerd (yes vlado I know you can vouch for that :) ) and like to fiddle and learn new stuff, this gave me a chance to learn some digital electronics :)
is my trigger / timer was self built - link is dead to the original info will have to recreate it sometime..
..
though the equipment is sitting in the corner / haven't used it in a year or so....
always big plans to revisit ... but ..
I do have a couple of Arduino boards for other nefarious purposes,
again big plans ...
... but then again I'm a nerd (yes vlado I know you can vouch for that :) ) and like to fiddle and learn new stuff, this gave me a chance to learn some digital electronics :)
Yes... most definitely a nerd. But I can't vouch for whether or not you like to "fiddle" or not... I though you were a guitarist, and frosty1 was the violinist. ;)
