Cool Drops (CD) with two light techniques..

Winter is almost started in Green Bay and shooting table top shot is best idea when you don't find more opportunities to shoot outdoor. So this weekend I tried to shoot water drops on the CD/DVD.

I used two different lighting techniques to get the exposures and both have different results. The first one I used a slow a shutter speed and did a light painting to shoot the drops. Its simple, easy and fun to try the various lighting angles to paint the water drops. I used LED flash light in a dark room with a shutter speed of 10-15 sec. 

Set up is very simple, you need:

• Tripod to avoid camera shake  
• A flash light   a dropper/syringe to put the water drops on CD/DVD   
• CD/DVD - I found DVD gives better results as the light reflected from DVD surface is more dense and cool than CD surface.  
• Use self timer so as to avoid shake due to shutter release pressure.

For below shots I used my Vivitar flash (Vivitar DF383) with 1/16th power and a shutter speed between 1/160-1/200sec. I wanted to get the bouncing water drop but it was not as simple as I thought because on DVD surface water do not bounce it just splash. In this case, I used shutter release cable to avoid camera shake. Hope you enjoyed the pics.

Here is the setup shot:

Canon 28-105mm good generic lens...

What a coincident....I recently came to know that my neighbor (Owen Zyltra) is a photographer, thats a great surprise for a hobbyist like me !! Last week we had a chat over his apartment and exchanged our photography thoughts...which was a fruitful discussion...Owen is a Canon shooter (5D / 40D) and has almost all the gears which I dream about, the prime and L series lenses which covers most of the focal ranges, Canon Speedlites, elilnchrom light system, pocket wizards etc etc....so no doubt I was amazed.

The best part is he lend me 28-108mm macro lens ... it’s a pretty good lens which covers generic focal lengths. With my Canon T1i the equivalent focal length comes to 44.8-160mm which give me better compression at f4.5 which is cool.. I enjoyed shooting with this lens indoor/outdoor, low light and with off camera flash... here are some pics I shoot of my daughter Urvi :)

Thanks Owen :)