Splash Session

We were recently invited by the Essendon Camera Club to run a 'studio' for one of their 'bring your camera nights'. The brief was open so we decided to see how fast the trigger fingers of the ECC members really are. Could they time it just right to catch a great splash?

The set up was quite simple, a large translucent reflector with a speedlite behind it was both the background and the light source. Two plastic wine glasses, some food dye and a bucket on a table to catch most of the splashes was all that was needed for props.

On the technical side, the speedlite was set to 1/32 power. This reduces the flash duration sufficiently to freeze the motion of the splashes. An exposure was determined where the brightest area of the background was just white with some fall off of light towards the edges.

Next came the fun part - SPLASHING and SHOOTING! I mentioned earlier the bucket to catch the splashes, well that sort of happened. It was the wine glass 'operator' who caught most of the splashes.

A highly enjoyable evening where we learned that most ECC members did indeed have great timing skills. Thank you ECC for the invitation.