After playing around with the Pluto Trigger for last week's post, I decided to see what I could come up with using a few things I had laying around.

Canon 5DmkIII 70-200mm (160mm) iso 160 1/160sec. f5.6

It was heaps of fun (albeit a little damp) and I was pretty happy with the results.

If you are up with your photography basics you will know that there is no way a shutter speed of 1/160th of a second is going to freeze the motion of water droplets. So how does it work?

The exposure is totally reliant on the light from flash. It is the extremely short duration of the burst of light from the flash that stops the motion (some as fast as 1/20,000th sec).

Modern cameras have extremely fast shutter speeds (up to 1/8000th of a second) but to take advantage of those high shutter speeds you need heaps of light...not something you usually have indoors.

Ok...the setup.

A) Tarp. Very important part of the setup to catch spillage (of which there is plenty).

B) Speedlight. Godox V860c fitted with 2 Magmod grids to eliminate any light spill (zooming the flash head would probably have down the job) triggered by Yongnuo YN622CII transceiver. This single flash is the primary light source for the shot...set at 1/16th power (manually set). The lower the output set on the speedlight, the shorter the duration of the flash.

C) Speedlight. Godox V860c fitted with a red gel, manually set to a power output of 1/32nd and triggered by another Yongnuo transceiver. This flash is there purely to add the background colour.

D) Reflector. This provides some fill to the front of the glass...bouncing light back from the primary speedlight (B).

E) Background. Extremely high budget item...a white shower curtain. (This particular curtain is dual purpose...it's translucent so at other times I shoot flash through it and it becomes a large diffuser).

F) Camera. In this case a Canon 5DmkIII with a Canon 70-200 f2.8 (the longer lens let me keep the camera out of the splash zone) a Yongnuo transceiver and cable release. (I started using the Pluto trigger (see last week's post) but found holding my phone and tapping the screen to fire the camera a bit cumbersome and difficult to get my timing right while dropping a slice of lemon with my other hand).

Although I used radio triggers in this setup, it would be possible to use a single off-camera speedlight triggered optically by the camera's pop-up flash and using an unlit, coloured background. The only limitation is your imagination...the important bit being the short duration flash to freeze the action.

Go on...have some fun.

...well since writing the above, I managed to find a cable that would let me trigger a flash using the Pluto trigger laser...so I took my own advice...and had some fun.

The laser and trigger worked exactly as the manufacturer said it would...(a bit of a relief after giving it a rap in my last post)

So the theory with this setup is ...the laser beam passes across the top of the tank and the trigger is attached to the speedlight. When the beam is broken the speedlight fires triggering the strobe via its optical sensor.

The camera is set for an exposure of about a second, allowing time for me to start the exposure and drop whatever it is that is intended to break the laser beam. (this all happens in a darkened room to remove ambient light exposure).

I found the tricky bit to be working out how much delay to dial into the app to take into account the delay between the beam being broken and the item entering the frame...working in milliseconds!

Working out the length of delay was quite tricky...a matter of trial and error.

I had fun...and came up with a couple of images I quite like.

Catch you next week. Never stop learning.

GWP blogspot

Making a splash...