Water Sculptures - a Strobist Project

I always wanted to try this and finally i managed to find the time to did just that! I call them Water Sculptures. Its categorized as high speed photography cause you will need pretty high shutter speed to freeze the motion of the moving water. I used between 1/2000s to 1/4000s shutter speed for these photos below.

When i undertake certain project, my main concern is to make use of whatever gears/accessories i had so that the cost to take these photos will be at minimum if not zero.

My actual cost for this project was actually ZERO. Yup! u read me .. no cost at all. I made use of all the stuffs i can find/had in the house and this is the results. (I did borrowed a Sony F58AM flash gun from HoKC tho) Full list of the gears/equipment involved will be listed at the bottom of this post.

I call this one "The little Boy" this was done with 2 F58AM flash gun one with a blue gel and another one with red gel.

Perfect blue sphere

Inverse Exclamation Mark

E.T.'s Finger

Aligned

The Red Beam

Floating Red sphere

Twisted

Checkmate!

There are of course many others photographs that turn out pretty interesting, the reason I m not putting it up here is because i dont wanna Kill your bandwidth by loading this page.

The most important thing that you need to pay attention to is the timing, to get the timing right you gotta be really patient and train for it. At different level the water droplets will be producing different kinda sculpture/shape. To get the kinda shape you want you might need to get it correct down to milliseconds. For more photos please visits my Facebook Profile @ http://www.facebook.com/rojaks.wingz#!/album.php?aid=159394&id=505411298

Here is the list of the item/gears/equipment i used (my simple setup)

My simple setup that allowed me t capture all the wonderful wonderful images posted above. I order to be able to capture great photos ....the setup doesn't have to be complicated ok?

1. Camera : Sony Alpha A550
2. Lens 1 : Carl Zeiss 16-80mm f3.5-4.5
3. Lens 2 : Sony DT 30mm f2.8 Macro
4. Sony F58AM x 2 (or any HSS capable flash guns - HSS stands for High Speed Sync which will enable you to go beyond the speed of 1/250s wirelessly)
5. Tripod x 2 (one to hold the camera and one to hold the mineral water bottle)
6. Empty mineral water bottle x 1 (you gotta poke a hole at the bottom fo the bottle and then adjust the waterflow by unscrewing the top cap)
   
7. Wires (to hold the bottle in place n tie the bottle to the tripod)
8. Big transparant bucket ( I used a beer cooler for this)
9. Water (someone asked in FB if i used oil as the liquid lol no its only water)
   
10. Colored Gel for the flash guns.
11. I also used a wired triggered/shutter remote switch for the fear of shaking/moving the camera when i press the shutter button)
    
12. Lotsa patients!!
    

Enjoy! Feel free to post your questions in the comment section if you have any regarding the method or the setup. I will try my best to help out ok?