Final Project - first experiments

I decided to photograph fruit dropping into glasses fill with water, using flash to try and capture and freeze the water from the splash.

This was my setup for back lighting the shot. There is a strobe firing through an opaque white piece of plexiglass which I got from a sign shop. There is a photo sensor on the top of the tripod that runs to a timing box. When the fruit makes the sensor the box opens the shutter then fires the flash .01 seconds later.

Color card I shot first so I could use it to set the levels in photoshop. This got me close although I had to adjust all the levels slightly to get the something I liked.

I set the camera to manual focus and live view and zoomed in to set the focus as perfect as possible.

Experiment to set the flash delay to try to capture the moment, or shortly after, that the fruit hit the water. The room was black so the shutter was set to 5 seconds and the flash captured the photo.

One of the first try's, using apple slices. Since these were just to prove out the method I didn't clean up the water between shots. Notice the horizon is off, I wasn't careful about setting the camera at a right angle to the glass and perfectly level.

Tried with the camera closer, decide I didn't like this as much.

Example where the timing wasn't perfect.

The strobe was used with a beauty dish with a white cover to smooth out the light as much as possible. With 100% back lighting the fruit came out black so I added a flash next to the camera for fill flash. I was having problems with the strobe triggering the flash so I switch the timing box to trigger the flash and the flash triggered the strobe.

I liked most of the photos, but wasn't thrilled with any of them. None had the wow factor I was looking for, so instead I tried a poster idea with multiple ok shots to show how ever attempt is different.

Poster idea except with the close cropped shots.