Just as a big Cali­for­nian com­pany is releas­ing new products as we speak, let’s go back again to a purely “pho­to­graphic” entry.

This shot was a bit of an exper­i­ment… Inspired by this post in the amaz­ing Digital Pho­to­graphy School blog, I wanted to take a photo involving water drops. For the set-​up of the shot, check out this “mak­ing of” photo.

The apple was placed on a glass in a sink where I “fine tuned” the tap so that only a small vol­leys of drops would come out every now and then. If you look at the aper­ture and the expos­ure time, you’ll see that the ambi­ent light couldn’t pos­sibly influ­ence the shot. That’s why the back­ground appears com­pletely black. The reason for these extreme set­tings was to achieve exactly that, to freeze the motion as good as pos­sible and to have a large enough depth of field in this rather macro-​y situ­ation.

Light­ing. As you can see in this shot, the only light here was com­ing from an external flash (triggered wire­lessly), a mir­ror (to bounce some of the light back) as well as two impro­vised reflect­ors. After fid­dling with the expos­ure para­met­ers and arran­ging the reflect­ors, I took about 20 shots try­ing to get the tim­ing right with the drops ran­domly com­ing out of the tap (which is harder than you’d think). In the end, I was really happy with the out­come, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted.

PS: Thanks to Kfir (my office-​mate) for bor­row­ing me an apple — I’m aller­gic to them, so I returned it after the shot :-)