Fortnightly Challenge - 23rd March to 5th April - Wet! Wet! Wet!

[John&me]

Congratulations,Clive very well done.


John

[Grassface]

Nice one Clive

[graham harcombe]

Congratulations Clive a worthy winner.

[andy153]

Congrats Clive.

[Peter Waites]

Good One Clive. Looking forward to the "how it's done---"

[DigiDiva]

Well done Clive. A lovely shot.

[Gidders]

Thank you everyone who voted for me - I'd always wanted to have a go at this style of photography

New challenge, ups & down and behind the scenes to follow

[Gidders]

Ups & Downs

Up - Graham's - Here I gooooooo!! Plenty of water so the shot fitted the theme. For me I think I would have like to have seen the duck a bit further to the right in the frame, & despite a 1/640 shutter speed it hasn't quite stopped the action so its not pin sharp.

Down - Andy's - The Water Cycle. I liked this & thought it would be a contender. Although the blue makes for quite a cold image it suits the letterbox format & has a tranquillity about it - I do find the sky reflected in the puddle bottom left a bit distracting.

As always guys - JMHO

[Gidders]

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

[graham harcombe]

Thanks for the explanation Clive. Our club had a presentation on just this subject a short while ago and the techniques used by the speaker were very similar except that he used a motion detector to trigger the flash.

My 'up' this comp. is Davy Gibbons Dog Days. I thought the shot was good for subject and has a nice cleanness and sharpness to it. Looking at the tiny bit of water it was a long exposure shot (I couldn't see any exif data to check) in which case it would have been nice to see a little more of that water. I liked the paw prints and puzzled how the dog must have been standing to make that shape!! Nice shot overall.

My 'down' is Clive. I voted for it, it won, not much manoeuvring space for criticism really. I did harbour a thought that all the impression of movement comes from the upper left down into the splash and had the glass been a fraction to the right it could have included more of the left hand splash which is all part of the direction of the action. But I have to say ...it is a cracking image.

Graham