Back To Water Drops

From my recent entry (Revisiting Water Drops), I have mentioned that I'd do my water drops again with my 50mm prime lens with the 580EX II flash. Tonight is the night that I went back to the water drops. An additional part of the experiment was to use wireless flash triggers. This would be a separate entry but to give you an introduction, in this way, the flash is not mounted on the camera's hot shoe slot but instead is placed somewhere else and triggered by wireless receivers.

So, my first task was to set the aperture and the flash output. At first, I went with a large aperture but I was having getting focused drops due to the thin DOF. I therefore ended up using f/8.0 with ISO 100, 1/200 sec shutter speed.

I'm really impressed how the prime was doing as I have a high success rate of getting whole drops of water. Without further due, here are some of the water drops I was able to get:

I call the first one as the "Magnifying Glass" and the second as the "Orb".

I have the rest of the set in here: Water Drop Project.

Water Drop Project

Against The Sun

What kind of photos usually appear when you have your subject in front of a light source, for example the sun? More than usual it would be a black subject (silhouette) and a bright background.

Here's a little practical application of working against the sun in order to expose for the subject -- use fill-in flash. Yes, flash in daylight again just like my previous exercise: Cosmos Plants Exercise. In that exercise, the sun was at my back and now it's in front of me.

The little trick here is to know how much fill-in flash to use. It was trial and error for me. Here's the result of this morning's encounter with my cosmos flowers.

One thing to remember though, be careful when working against the sun as this can be harmful to both your eyes and camera's sensor.

This morning's recipe:
  1000D/XS + kit lens at 55mm, f/16, 1/50 secs, ISO 100, FEC (Flash Exposure Compensation): 0

Another note: I just noticed today that the bokeh on the kit lens (18-55mm f/3.5-5.6) are hexagonal when I thought that they were circular. Time to check the technicals of the kit lens. :)

Candlelight Experience

I've been trying to get some warm photos of lighted candles and here are the results of my recent attempt:

Some essentials to get things done:

    1. Dark and windless room - important to get the flame from not dancing around and flickering.
    2. Tripod or something stable to put the camera on - this kind of photography will need a little extra time for exposure thus something stable will aid in avoiding camera shake.
    3. Heat tolerance - well it's a windless room and minimal circulating is around.
    4. A couple of candles and matches - obviously needed but do take care in handling these.
    5. Patience - not so long exposure, heat, and multiple trials will surely test your patience.

Some technicals I used:

    1. Wide aperture - not really wide, just enough to get a shallow depth-of-field.
    2. Low ISO - to compensate for the sensitivity of light.
    3. Slow shutter speed - this allowed me to get some blur on the flame.

I've included this with my Pyro At Works album. When I get more candle light photos, I'm sure to move them in a separate album.

Pyro At Works