Indoor Home Studio – Water Droplets

Water droplets are a fun technique that’s easy to do at home, in your kitchen or bathroom, and the results can be highly impressive.

1. Place a bowl of water on a table or set yourself up over the kitchen sink. Fill a strong polythene bag with water and pinprick this to create your drops of water. Alternatively, use a pipette to create drops of water into the bowl as required. This water will show up better on your image if you add a few drops of food colouring to it.

© Craig Roberts

2. You can either use on-camera or off-camera flash for lighting. If using off-camera flash, then ideally place the flashgun to one side of your set-up using an extension cord. This will then fire the flash as you press the shutter. You can use on-camera flash by bouncing the light onto the water from behind your set-up with a piece of white card or envelope.

3. A shutter speed of 1/200th second is required to freeze the drops of water as it hits the water in the bowl. An aperture of f/8 will give sufficient depth-of-field. Set these on your camera in manual mode, but make sure the shutter speed matches your camera flash sync speed.

© Craig Roberts

4. Check the results on the rear LCD and change the aperture for any over or under-exposure adjustment.

5. Take plenty of pictures, as your results will be down to timing and a bit of luck.

© Craig Roberts