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Hi all,
I have been trying to take a shot of an object being dropped into a bowl of milk. The objective is to capture the object at the exact point when it enters the milk so that half the object is immersed and half showing and there is a small splash and swirl. I have been trying for hours and taken over 500 shots without success. I seem to always catch the shot either just before the object has entered the milk or after it is fully immersed. My camera is set up to shoot continuous and I start shooting just before the object the object is dropped. Because I am indoors under studio lighting my max shutter speed is about 1/150 and I am wondering if this is the problem.
Any help greatly appreciated.
Regards
Paul
I have teh same question and asked a Pro friend... he said teh trick setting the shutter speed ... waiting to see answers to this Paul.
why woudl you say you have a limitation about 1/150 indoors? I am a learner and I thought if you have learned the techniques, you could set what ever shutter speed you desire .... pardon teh dumb question but how else would a dummy learn 
?
Quote: my max shutter speed is about 1/150
That could be the problem Paul, Can you not shoot at 250...?
Although if you have a speedlight you could go higher still....!
Having said that I'm no expert in this field of photography...
Edit; I mention speedlight, Because the recycle time should be faster than studio lights.....!
THIS article might help.
Switch it to single shot - unless you are using a strobe light with the shutter being held open the studio flash will not recharge fast enough.
It then comes down to trial and error as regarding the timing - however, if you drop your obeject from a consistant height (ie as high as your arm stretches) and use a shutter release cable or remote release you should be able to judge pretty accurately within one or two trials what delay to use.
It's just trial and error unless you have some clever electronic shutter release system or strobe lighting.
My method for shooting water drops into a mug was to set the tap dripping at about 1 drop per second and just keep taking shots. As the drops were at a steady rate it allowed me to judge the timing fairly accurately. Camera on auto exposure.
After about 250 tries I managed about half a dozen reasonable pix.
Could you set up some sort of string/cable operated release mechanism, which would allow you to concentrate more on the job of firing the shutter?
If you have several of the same object could you release them one at a time at set intervals? That way you may be able to judge the timing more accurately.
I think you are not likely going to freeze the action you want with shutter speed alone. Most high speed photography is done by flash.
If you can have a completely dark room, it is easiest to just leave the shutter open and use flash-only.
For these types of shots you have the option of luck, and many, many shots. If you need consistent results, you're going to have to introduce some sort of sensor and timing device that can be adjusted to trigger the flash at the exact moment you want.
Since you need to see what you're doing, crank up the flash, and set the shutter to as high as allowed.
If your flash uses intelligent TTL, the camera will probably send a series of pre-flashes to get metering correct. Timing all this by hand is darned near impossible!
You will want to, at the very least, use a dumb flash or connect your intelligent flash via pc-sync cable so that the camera doesn't know how to communicate with the flash. This will result in one single immediate flash and will help with your timing.
Good luck. If you are looking for something close, keep at t you'll get it. I've done something similar to macroman in the past, and ended up with a few decent images.
If you're looking for an exact image, you will probably need to look up how to obtain or build triggering devices.
FYI, I found this link (could not find the one I really wanted), the circuit diagram at this link is much more complex but it still might give you enough information to go on and look for better solutions.
http://makezine.com/04/strobe/
Thanks for the tips so far. Seems I am trying using totally wrong technique. When I say studio lights I mean halogen spotlamps that are not tied in with the camera. My set up is by a window so that I can obtain as much natural light as possible such that I may have as faster shutter speed as possible so that I can have rapid quick fire repeat shooting in the hope that one of the shots will achieve my objective. I thought this was gonna be easy without having to venture into such things as strobe lighting or sync flash. Thanks for the link Anthony and your helpful advice.
Paul
The secret to stopping the action is the flash gun and not the shutter speed.
Long time since I've done the splashing strawberries in cream sort of shot, but I can assure you that like the water drops the shutter speed would have been 1/60th second.
The flash however, would have been set to 1/64th or 1/128th output, which I read somewhere ages ago equates to somewhere around 1/20,000th sec or quicker. I have no way of measuring this so I have to take it at face value.
So the answer is to borrow a flashgun or two.
Quote: Quote:Long time since I've done the splashing strawberries in cream sort of shotOnly 'cus you kept scoffing them
Untrue! I don't like cream! Only sometimes in coffee.
Actually just been to local PYO, but not been enough sunshine for them to ripen with any natural sweetness. Prefer ice cream with mine, but strawberries dropping into ice cream does not a good picture make 
Quote: but strawberries dropping into ice cream does not a good picture make
That depends how long you leave the ice cream out for
Like Cheryl said, it's all about the flash duration, not the shutter speed. This was taken using two Nikon speedlites at 1/16th. I think my shutter speed was about 1/60th if I remember correctly.
As for the timing, it's just down to trial and error. Just be thankful you aren't trying this on film
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