View Single Post
  #19  
Old 10-04-14, 01:08
Gidders's Avatar
Gidders Gidders is offline  
Super Moderator
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: West Midlands
Posts: 2,795
Default

Behind the Scenes

See attached images for the set up. The camera was set up at f8 with a 1 sec shutter speed with the self timer on. The curtains were drawn & the room lights turned off so even with a 1 sec exposure, this resulted in a totally black image.

My Ex580 speedlight was set up to the right of the vase with a reflector & grid to control the light spill - the power setting set manually to match the f8 camera setting gave 1/16 power and the flash was triggered by a hand held radio trigger. The vase was set on a piece of 'rudra' glass for the reflections & a silver reflector on the opposite side of the flash to even the illumination

To take the shot - press the shutter release, while the self timer is beeping get into position to drop the strawberries into the vase, when the shutter opens, drop the fruit & time the firing of the flash to stop the action when the fruit had hit the water but before they reached the bottom of the vase. It took a bit of practice to get the timing right but only about 20 attempts to get this shot.

The sharp eyed of you will notice two things in the attached set up shot: -
1: the vase has lemons in it - when reviewing the shots tried with lemons, I found the water had gone murky after about two attempts & I couldn't be bothered to reset the water every time - hence the use of strawberries
2: the studio strobes in the lastolite background - originally I'd planned to do this shot with a white background. Studio flashes/strobes don't have a particularly short flash duration - mine are ~1/2500 sec when on full power (& as you turn the power down the flash duration gets longer) & I found the images just weren't sharp enough showing some motion blur. When I switched to my speedlight, (with speedlights the flash duration gets shorter as you turn the power down) on 1/16 power they have a duration of ~1/15000 sec which froze the action nicely. But with only one speedlight I had to switch to a black background.

So there you have it
Attached Images
File Type: jpg Behaind the Scenes-001-1950.jpg (174.0 KB, 12 views)
__________________
Clive
http://www.alteredimages.uk.com
Reply With Quote