Rainy Day Photography
Today has been nothing but rain, and ruined my plans to do some outdoor macro photography. So, I thought I would try my hand at photographing water droplets.
I didn’t want to sit outside in the rain, and try to time the drops hitting the ground, so I came up with a somewhat crude, but effective rig to deliver my water droplets when I wanted, and always in the exactly the same spot.
Half an IKEA wine rack, some straws, baking paper, sticky tape, a pirex baking dish, and of course… water. The end result was this (excuse the bad quality iphone photo):
I got my tripod, set up the camera, spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get my Speedlite flash to fire wirelessly. Took another 30 minutes after that to then work out the power, and position, and finally I was ready to start taking photos.
I set the Speedlite flash to manual, and set the power to 1/32. I also set my 7D to Manual, I set the aperture to 5.0, and shutter speed to 1/200th of a second. I also set Mirror Lock on, and manually focused using my Sigma 105mm Macro lens, so I knew I would get the photos as sharp as possible.
I added some green food colouring to the water, just enough to add a bit of a hue.
Lastly for a bit of texture, I added some olive oil just to what it would look like. Beautiful to see up close.
After about 100 photos, half of which was nothing but blurry water, or left over ripples, I now really appreciate the effort put into some of the amazing photos you see in magazines, and the patience that goes with it. Here’s my favourite shot.
Hope you enjoyed these.
Stuart.
