Now that I am spending less time building my water drop setup and more time playing with it I thought I would share some more progress.
Recently I played around with cross polarization - which is placing polarizing gels on the speedlights and a polarizer over the lens. When aligned correctly the technique removes most reflections. I decided to try it on a black liquid to best see the effect.
This is with cross polarization
The River Styx by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
And this is without. Note that I changed the gel for the background between shoots.
Rain Cap by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
Personally I found X-polarization useful but it is a technique that really requires more lights. The polarizer gel and filter took too much light away and required me to go higher in ISO than I preferred. I also think in retrospect black liquid was a very poor choice for the test. In the future I plan to try this again with a lighter liquid and more lights.
In this shot I started trying something much different but didn't meet much luck there. I wound up playing with the reflections on the drops. This is caused by the color of the drops themselves combined with the geled speedlight behind them and the effectively geled (through the water) speedlight below. I like the effect but need to play with this more to better understand it.
Bowling for Bubbles by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
This is another failure. I started by trying to collide drops in midair - similar to what I did in my 2nd shot above - but I had difficulties getting it to work again. I then collided drops with the splatter of the first drop, where I succeeded but found the effect not so interesting. I ended up with this shot.
Into the Wishing Well by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
Recently I played around with cross polarization - which is placing polarizing gels on the speedlights and a polarizer over the lens. When aligned correctly the technique removes most reflections. I decided to try it on a black liquid to best see the effect.
This is with cross polarization
The River Styx by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
And this is without. Note that I changed the gel for the background between shoots.
Rain Cap by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
Personally I found X-polarization useful but it is a technique that really requires more lights. The polarizer gel and filter took too much light away and required me to go higher in ISO than I preferred. I also think in retrospect black liquid was a very poor choice for the test. In the future I plan to try this again with a lighter liquid and more lights.
In this shot I started trying something much different but didn't meet much luck there. I wound up playing with the reflections on the drops. This is caused by the color of the drops themselves combined with the geled speedlight behind them and the effectively geled (through the water) speedlight below. I like the effect but need to play with this more to better understand it.
Bowling for Bubbles by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
This is another failure. I started by trying to collide drops in midair - similar to what I did in my 2nd shot above - but I had difficulties getting it to work again. I then collided drops with the splatter of the first drop, where I succeeded but found the effect not so interesting. I ended up with this shot.
Into the Wishing Well by CalevPhoto, on Flickr
