Macro splash photography tutorial at home: NO TRIGGER

in today's video i show how to take awesome high-speed water drop photos from the comfort of your own home [Music] so you've probably seen those amazing photos of water droplets coming into a pool of water and splashing up and making amazing shapes i certainly had and i thought they looked really cool and i really wanted to give it a try i've spent quite a lot of time experimenting with this and i have found it to be fairly difficult in the a lot of the tutorials that i saw required quite specialist equipment in particular a lot of them required a timed water dropper which you set up and it drops water and it triggers your camera and that's how you get consistent results now that's fine but getting hold of those things isn't easy and they're not super cheap and i didn't want to buy a dedicated piece of hardware like that just to do one sort of creative experiment while i'm bored at home during lockdown so instead i've been working out ways of getting really really great results by just using the standard photography equipment that i've already got or that you might already have so that you can do this without having to spend yet more money on photography equipment but it has been a bit of an awkward setup i've taken thousands of test shots i'm not gonna take you through every single thing i did right and wrong i'm just gonna cut to the chase and tell you what i found out and take you through my setup over here okay so let's start with the camera itself it is my canon 5d4 with a mil macro lens on there you definitely will need a macro lens of some kind to get the shots because they are close up you are going to need those close focusing distances so next up is your pool of war set now in this case i've just used a standard baking dish they're great for lasagnas great for shepherd's pie and apparently great for water droplet photography i filled this up most of the way with just plain water it does have a red sheen because i've been using some red food dyes so it has slightly colored it but that's not a problem at all crucially it's quite big so it's giving me a decent area to put my drops into and it's deep enough that when they hit they cause quite a big splash rather than it being very shallow where um the splash isn't quite so magnificent let's say the droplets themselves i am creating just using one of these little plastic um pipettes i bought about 50 of these from amazon for about five pounds a few months ago for uh something else entirely irrelevant um so it's nice to be able to use them again here but what you can see i've done is i've salo taped it to well this is actually my existing overhead uh camera rig that i use when i'm doing top-down product photography um but you don't need to have anything like this all you need to do is make sure that this is secure in one place overhead you could maybe lean two chairs onto each other to create like an a-frame over the top salutate it to that as long as it's stable as long as it's secure that's all that matters keeping your pipette or dropper whatever you're using in one place is absolutely essential because it means that your drops are always going to hit the water at the same point that means that you can frame up your shot and get your focus spot on every time you drop it's going down you know you're gonna get a good shot okay let's talk lighting we've got two lights that i'm using for this as you can see i've got one godox 8d 200. now this is just a fairly cheap speed light you don't need loads of power you could definitely use like canon flash guns or nikon flash guns or whatever you don't need big powerful professional flashers something cheap and basic like this uh will do but crucially they need to be off camera and you need to be able to wirelessly trigger them uh you know i'm just using the standard godox trigger and that works a charm now this light off to the side is what's going to be lighting up at the drop as this drop splashes up here this light comes across lights up that droplet and really carves it out from its background oh yeah this is all mucky you can see how many tests i've been doing this is looking gross now the other like this one is a little bit more interesting this one as you can see is currently pointing away from the scene straight at this back wall now this one's taken quite a lot of experimenting for me because at first i had this sort of pointed more towards the water trying to light up the whole scene but actually i found a much better way is to use this whole wall this empty white space now basically what i'm doing is i've got my camera an angle that it is seeing the wall reflected in this water that means that when this lights up with this flash what we're seeing is a lovely lit up reflected wall here that gives a beautiful soft light that means those ripples when the water splashes are really nicely lit and you also get some nice color toning coming from this it also allows if i wanted i could put coloured gels on this light change the colour of this wall and therefore change the colour of the water that we're seeing it's really really effective as we start shooting i'll show you a little bit more about what i mean with that but this is a really really good way of doing it because you don't need to set up uh big like white panels over your over your shooting area you don't need to i've seen um tutorials where they've set up like white sheets um so you don't necessarily need to do that if you have got a plain white wall you can do exactly this or if you don't maybe just a big piece of white paper uh lay it sort of nearby and fire the light at that crucially you don't fire the light at your water you reflect that light from something else and it works really really well now the camera settings for a shot like this are of course critical and it's the area that i've done the most experimenting with and that i found tricky to get right at first so the first way that i tried doing this was using high speed sync and using a very very fast shutter speed of about eight thousandth of a second and it sort of worked but the results didn't look great and then i had to use a higher iso speed um and instead i've gone a completely different direction with it so instead of using an incredibly fast shutter speed i'm now using a shutter speed of around four seconds now i know what you might be thinking four seconds that motion is going to be blurred the water drop comes in it's just going to be a blur of water it's not going to look good well that's not the case because what actually happens when you do high-speed water droplets like this it is not the shutter speed of the camera that freezes the water in place it's actually that quick burst of light so what's actually happening is that i'm leaving the shutter open i'm dropping in a couple of drops of water and as they hit the water i'm firing that light that just gives a very very quick burst of flash and then the exposure stops taking and even though it was four seconds long it's only seeing that very very quick burst of light and so everything is frozen absolutely pin sharp so i'm using a four second exposure just because that gives me time to start the camera going reach up do the drops and then press the uh the flash firing button i could do two seconds if i was a bit quicker or i could do 10 seconds if i needed enough time my other settings that i'm using i'm using a very narrow aperture around f14 in order to try and get more front to back sharpness on that droplet and i'm using the lowest iso possible that is iso 100 on my camera even so using such a long shutter speed does mean that it's capturing a lot of ambient light so when i'm shooting i'm gonna have to be turning all of these lights off and make sure that my room is pretty much as dark as possible to make sure that none of this light is in my shot only the burst from my flashes will be visible okay so let's just have another look at my scene then my camera is set up and i've got it on live view just so i can kind of have a rough idea of what's going on it's it's quite challenging to get your focus right in the first place because um i'm focusing in the middle of the water somewhere around here-ish um but it does mean that you've just got kind of the front of the dish in the back but that's fine we can we can sort that out later on um it takes some fiddling to get the position right but you know experiment see what works best for you maybe you've got a bigger dish or maybe you've just got like a big wide tray and you don't need to worry about getting the edges in frame too much but this seemed to work quite well for me so to get my focus i need to use the dropper and that means i bring up some of my liquid to the dropper because of course it's all secured in place i don't want to be moving it around fill it up with a liquid and then i can just drop it a couple of drops into the water and just pay attention to exactly where it is where it's landing at which point i can basically put my finger in roughly the area where i saw it not roughly exactly the area i saw it and i can just make sure that that is where my frame is set up and that's where i'm focused okay so now everything's set up we've got our scene we've got our focus we've got our lights and we've got the dropper secured nicely in place so now it's time to actually start taking the shots and as i say we need to have a dark room right now this isn't going to work but i'm going to show you the process so you can get an idea of how i'm taking these shots so step one is making sure that my lights are firing now if you're just using a wireless trigger there is a test button and you can just press that and your lights will fire you can keep on pressing it and because these lights are on fairly low power they're both on around 132 power um they can fire pretty quickly um and also they fire a very very quick burst of light so everything's set up here's how we actually take our shot we go to the camera we start taking our photo i also do have a wireless wireless trigger a remote shutter trigger here which i can also press we can press that that started taking its photo drop and i missed it completely okay let's try it again take a photo drop and take the flash when it hits the water so i did get a bit of a shot of the water hitting that surface and creating some ripples but it was very overexposed because of all this ambient light but the next process using this technique basically is trial and error it takes patience it takes time it takes a lot of repeating the same thing again and again one of the reasons why it's more difficult if you don't have one of those automated droppers is that you just have to figure out the timing for yourself you literally have to drop and when you see the water hitting the surface that's when you fire your light there isn't an automated way there isn't a do it wait a second and do it um there isn't a i don't have laser triggers that seeing exactly when it breaks the surface of the water to take the shot i'm just doing it by eye that means some shots are gonna work but most of the time i'm just going to miss the water droplet all together but for me that has been kind of the fun of it as well because every water drop is different you could do three drops rather than just the one you could do a whole pipettes worth in one go and see what sort of weird shapes it makes as it hits the water so as a result every single shot is different the water creates different shapes and you can get really really interesting shots the more you keep going i think last night when i was doing these tests i probably taken about a thousand photos 95 of which were garbage and would be immediately deleted because they were just empty uh little tubs of water i missed the splash completely but when you do get those nice ones and you look at them on the back of camera you go wow that looks really really cool so from this point it really is just a case of doing the same thing again opening that shutter doing the drops and hitting the light at just the right moment and with a bit of luck a bit of practice and a bit of patience you should be able to get some really good shots so for now i'm going to turn the lights out and i'm going to get shooting so as we say the process begins filling up the dropper and then gonna get my light trigger and my remote shutter in hand ready to go step one set the camera going like that drops and i missed it okay so that's a shame we're gonna do it again drops i sort of got a little bit of a splash there but we'll keep going set the camera going drops take one flash and that's lovely lovely sort of ball of red hovering above the water but we keep going because everyone is different as i say and sometimes i'll try doing a little bit more sometimes i'll just try and do one tiny drop it entirely depends so what i haven't talked about though is the liquids that i'm using now in this was just water it has been slightly coloured red by the um by the dye that i've been using except that in the photos it looks blue because of the white balance and because of the flash that i'm using in this pipette in here is just more water with a bit of red food coloring and also a little bit of milk now milk basically makes the water more opaque which means it's also going to catch the light more and also stand out from the blue water that bit easier so i actually found that that's a pretty good um solution to use i haven't used glue or oils or um cream i've seen in some just standard things around the house apparently almond milk works quite well if you are dairy free and again missed it completely that time and i will miss it most of the time and sometimes it'll just look a little bit messy um i found some that i've got a perfect nice sort of round ripple with one red orb hovering above it looks beautiful very simplistic very minimalist very peaceful um others i've got more of a bigger splash that crown of splash coming up which looks a little bit more dramatic um i love both and i love the fact that every single time i do it i get a completely different shot no two are alike they are all unique um and that's really exciting so what i'm gonna keep doing is just doing this again and again and again as many times as basically until i get bored this is probably a good thing to do on a on a weekend when you've got maybe a whole day three or half a day at least give yourself a few hours set something up experiment with this i'm also going to try putting gels on my lights i'm going to try getting different color effects i'm going to maybe also try using different colored water droplets to to drop in i've got a few hours now so i'm going to experiment and see what i think works well and after this we're going to take things over into photoshop and show how i will do a little bit of retouching to make these shots even better so i've jumped over into lightroom and in this folder already there are about 295 photos which um i've sort of gone through and these are only the ones which were at least semi-decent shots like this or this one there were at least three or four times this many on my actual memory card but most of them were like i completely missed the splash it really is all about trial and error you have to take a lot of photos it takes a long time but eventually with enough perseverance you will get some shots that you really like if i just organize these by my ratings because i have done some uh ratings on some and we can see that i have got some interesting splashes going on this is what i'm talking about getting different uh types of splashes with every single one like i love the simplicity of this of these um well three and one mirrored um balls of of liquid coming in um there's a very like nice sort of peaceful symmetry which i'm really keen on um i really like this again very symmetrical very clean um the focus is pin sharp on here if we have a look through i did a couple with um with some green which i which i quite like and i've done a couple of crowns as well and i've done a little bit of tweaking to this if we just have a look at the original raw you can just see basically brightened it up added a little bit of clarity for pop but one of my absolute favorite ones that i've done is this one here because we've got that crown the elusive crown and you get this by having one drop which creates that column a column just like this one and then that second drop hits that column and that's what creates that splash crown on top now that is something which is so much easier to get if you are using one of the timers that i'd mentioned where it very accurately uh lets two drops go in exactly the right time to create that doing it yourself pretty much is just luck and out of the probably couple of thousand shots that i took i only got three um i think that i that i managed to get with that crown this being one of them uh so i am and this was certainly i think my favorite i'm so i'm really really pleased and i thought i would just go through um some hopefully quite quick edits to show how i would take this shot further i think it looks really great as a raw file but there's a lot that you can do with this sort of photography to really take it further so we'll start with what may be the obvious i'm just gonna raise that exposure because it is a little bit dark i'm gonna increase the shadows quite a bit on the splash itself now it's gonna start looking a little bit washed out but that's okay because we can fix that um the things that i really rely on to try and really get that water looking almost glass-like and like it's a really amazing 3d sculpture is clarity dehaze and texture i have a clarity dehaze and texture tools i don't usually use a lot in my photography in landscapes they can look really nasty but actually in this oh it makes a difference so let's just raise that clarity slider up and as i do just notice what it's doing to that shot the dehaze as well is bringing some stuff in it's getting a little darker so let's raise that exposure back up we could even increase those shadows even more and look what it's doing and just kind of almost sculpting that that water we can do the same with the texture as well because that as well really helps these small lines inside um if we just go before and after we can see already how much difference that is making to our shot it's looking really really nice so i'm going to do a crop as well and i think i'm going to do this as a 69 because i really like having a lot of a negative space around the splash which really kind of shows that it is one splash in a big pool of water if i cropped in really close then you wouldn't kind of get that impression um that's just a personal preference it could also work just going very much as a one-to-one and focusing in on that splash but you know that's entirely up to you do what you think works best for your own shot for me i do like a 16 nine so maybe not quite uh the whole way but i very much want this splash to be in the middle i'm going to make sure that the uh that it's nice and straight but i think the the sort of the horizon line that we can see on the back which is actually kind of the edge of the dish that i was using um that isn't quite straight so what i'm going to do is actually straighten it up based on the actual splash itself so i'm going to make sure that this line is going right from this top bit straight down to this top bit um which it is there and it's not quite straight with that background line but that's okay because we're going to come back to that later on it's going to move it down one there we go in fact actually i'm gonna bring it back out that was a little bit that's a little bit too tight of a crop for me for my taste that for me i think is about spot on so at this point i'm not gonna do anything more in lightroom most of the stuff that i really want to do to this image actually that's not true that's not true at all uh one of the things i found really helpful is using the hsl panel um in particular the luminance because i want to make sure that this red of the splash is really standing out against the blue and so we can just grab the red channel in luminance and basically make the reds lighter and as i do i'll just pulse that up and down look how much that red is suddenly really popping out from the background it's adding in great detail it looks lovely there's a little bit of orange in there but i'm going to grab that orange hue and make it more into the red so we've got a real sort of rich blood red on this splash which looks great there is some purples in the scene as well including in the splash so i'm just going to have a quick look move it either side and see what i think of those purples and actually i think bringing it down to the blue looks quite nice not all the way necessarily but a little bit because it's almost like you can see through it um and you can see sort of more of that blue if it's up here it all sort of merges with the same red tone i like the fact that there's a little bit of kind of difference in the color we've got the red on the rim of the splash but in that middle canopy let's call it it's got a different tone so that's kind of cool i'm also going to grab the blue and move that slightly down away from being a sort of a purpley blue and much more into a cyan blue which i think gives a real nice color contrast with the red itself so now we're going to go edit in photoshop and we'll take it over there so in here what i really want to do is start out by neatening up the scene because it is a very very beautiful quite tranquil image with this nice sculpture in the middle but we've got a lot of debris in the water we've got some bubbles and also i think because the the pan of water i was using had been there for quite some time um we've just got bits of dust maybe even cat hairs and things going around so i want to neaten up all of this water just to make the scene look very calm and peaceful so i'm going to duplicate the layer so that we're starting from a um a good place and i'm going to start off with the uh spot removal tool the healing brush bigger size and for most of these i should just be able to uh click you know what some of these is going to work some of these it won't these spots up here i can just click on them click click click i'll zoom in later on and for my i'll try and keep this fairly quick um if i was doing this for my own stuff my own portfolio i'd make sure that i'm really zooming in at almost like a pixel level just to make sure that it is done very very well um you know it's worth taking your time over this because if you find afterwards that oh you've got this these noticeable spots that you didn't remove early on it's a bit of a bit of a faff to try and go back and fix those some of these larger ones i'm not going to use the spot tool i'm actually going to use the patch tool that's going to allow me just to draw draw around it move the patch to a different place and it has basically perfectly sort of cloned that area into it it's a much more i find accurate way of doing object removal like this so i'm just going to go around drawing these so you've got the idea this is kind of how we're going to do it so let's just skip all the boring stuff and we'll skip ahead until when it's all done so i think that's pretty much all of the uh bits of debris that i want to remove and i think it's very clear how much of a difference um that makes it means that now we've got this mill poll uh milpole mill pond still bit of water let's turn that off before all these dots and bits of debris looks very messy now smooth and calm except for only our splash in the middle but we're not done yet because we've got the issue of the horizon line is it with a horizon line it's just the edge of the pan um and i don't want that either i want the i want the water to seamlessly blend the colors are the same so we've just got this dark line so i want to remove that dark line and just have it blend nicely so i'm going to first of all uh duplicate this layer again and we're going to use the patch tool here so i'm going to select that first but then i'm going to go and use our polygonal lasso tool and i'm going to select here basically draw a box around this line then select our patch tool and we can just drag that patch to here let go and photoshop has done most of the work for us it isn't perfect and so i'm going to do it again something like this use a wider area that's going to help it blend a little bit better i might do the same here and that is pretty much all i would want to do i'm pretty happy there are some bits that that don't look great and with a bit more time i could perhaps fix those i might even go in and use the brush tool i might choose a color get the brush use a low flow of maybe two percent and just sort of paint a little bit to kind of even out those tones which i think is maybe going to help i could do the same here just a little bit um but then we do exactly the same on the other side we use the uh the lasso lasso lasso lasso lasso lasso lasso i can't remember how i say it anymore pretty sure lasso is how an american would say and and lasso is how it's supposed to be said anyway um so i'm going to do the same move that and has basically done it for us it is a really really powerful way of removing objects and you can use that on shots like this you can use that to get rid of horizons if you're doing um like a long exposure of a lake and you you want to get rid of some things in the distance you want that really nice peaceful serene scene it's a really really good way of doing it um we could maybe it's difficult to tell because for me on my photoshop i often get quite a lot of color banding where you get those sort of weird color lines and and artifacts that look a bit weird but that actually doesn't show up in uh in lightroom and it doesn't show up in the finished image so it's just how photoshop seems to display for me i don't know why i've got it set to the right uh mode but there we go that is basically my shot uh finished in terms of cleanup now there are some other things that i would like to maybe uh try on this um while we're here why not let's give it a go um i'm going to duplicate that layer again and i'm going to go into filter camera raw filter and we're just going to play around with adding a little bit more clarity so in camera raw we don't get that banding and so i can see that we've got a really nice smooth edge here it's pretty smooth over here there is a slight dark patch over here which again i would just use the brush tool and paint that out i won't show you you've seen how i do that we're focusing on the splash here so i'm going to increase the shadow i'm going to increase that clarity again so we're getting like double clarity now on this on this splash and what about that texture yeah let's boost that texture a little bit maybe boost the whites i think that's looking pretty good on i'm really focusing on the center of the splash here and you might think this is really overdone on the whole thing it now looks a bit too much and you're absolutely right so i'm going to press ok so now in this layer i'm going to create a layer mask i'm going to invert that layer mask so it's not showing and then using the brush tool oops wrong thing brush tool back a small brush size something around [Music] this and a low flow probably only i'm probably gonna go five percent i'm now just going to brush that effect back in on the stem of our splash both sides making sure i'm doing the same for the reflection so that looks great as well and i'm just gonna gently paint it in on the crown just like this so it's not going overboard we're not putting that clarity everywhere we're really just putting it on the stem it's a small tweak but look how much now that those like strands of color are standing out it's a small little touch but it makes a big difference overall to the shot so now if we look at the whole thing it's got so much more impact i really like it so controlling s will take us back to lightroom here it is um the last thing i'm going to do is just go down to my uh my detail panel there is quite a bit of image noise in it so i'm going to do noise reduction i'm going to go quite far because i think it can take it but i'm going to counter that by adding some sharpening quite a bit of sharpening actually up here but i'm going to use the masking tool now here's a little tip if you press and hold ctrl as you're using the masking tool uh sorry not control shift no not shift command or alt there we go i find it eventually um then you can it turns to black and white and so you can see exactly where it's going to be applying the sharpening and as i move the masking up what you're seeing here is that everywhere that's white is where it's going to apply the sharpening so we're seeing a lot of sharpening being applied to our background and i don't want any sharpening on the background we wanted to remove noise and we just want it on those like sharp details of the splash so as i move that masking up you'll see it disappear from the background and here is only now we can see applying to that let's zoom out it's only applying to the actual fine details this splash don't know what this is over here oh it's a little dot i forgot no problem we can do spot removal smaller size i don't know how i missed that one bing gone great news okay back to our back to our detail there we go so we're seeing just those details that are going to be sharpened that's great because it means i can increase that sharpening i'm still pressing and holding on my command or alt key so you can see exactly how much it's doing if you increase the radius you get a bit more but it starts to look a little a little fake so i'm going to keep it there and our detail about the same level so it's actually quite a lot of sharpening but this is quite an abstract object so it can really take quite a bit of sharpening if you use that much sharpening on say a portrait then you'd get a lot of weird artifacts it would look fake on their skin it wouldn't look very smooth but this is a glassy smooth subject i think it can take it if you look very close up maybe maybe a little bit noticeable but i think it's fine um and i think it adds an extra little bit of pop to this shot you can barely tell um but i can tell and um i really like it so that is basically everything that i would do to this shot in lightroom and photoshop we've we've decluttered it let's look at our original straight out of camera it's dark the colors are a little bit drab and we've got all of this sort of debris in the water and by just spending a few minutes in lightroom tweaking that exposure tweaking those colors and then cleaning it up in photoshop we've got this very beautiful serene shot that i'm very very pleased with this crown shot took a lot of commitment on on my part i i had to spend hours doing uh the splashes um i was really really thrilled when i when i finally got one um i got this other one with like a sort of a floating disc but unfortunately the focus wasn't there it's a real shame because if i'd have got this in focus and that would have looked really really cool so that is disappointing um this is another one that i got when i'd use an orange gel i kind of wish i hadn't used that gel i don't know i've done a lot to these colors here is the before and i don't know why but it's very washed out so i had to do a lot to kind of bring back that contrast and detail there was one more which clearly i haven't um uh put a put a star rating to yet uh and that would be this one here again we've got a lovely crown we've got lots of this nice orange sort of purple detail coming up in the splash more contrast because of the bigger um ripples in the water um unfortunately the crown itself is quite wide and so we haven't really got great focus on there now for a this is the first time i have ever tried water droplet photography and frankly for a first for a first attempt i'm really pleased with the results i've got but if i'm being really nitpicky um that isn't in focus it doesn't look particularly sharp on screen and so i wanted to keep on going until i got one i was really happy with and that is this one this is my wow i have done a good splash photo and i'm really pleased and hopefully that has been really helpful to see how i would go about taking this shot at home just using regular equipment i'm not using dedicated timers i'm not using dedicated triggers or anything like that i am just using a pipette stylotaped to something over a a little bath of water and using very standard camera equipment if this video has been helpful do please make sure to hit that like button it really does help my channel leave your thoughts in the comments below if you are not a subscriber to my channel do please consider subscribing i've got some more stuff coming up both the things that you can do at home if you are not able to travel because who is right now um and also i'm hoping to be able to do a lot more stuff out and about in scotland so um just as soon as i'm allowed so please do um subscribe stick along for the ride but that's it for me for now thank you so much for joining and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 12,378

Keywords: Water drop, Water droplet, droplet, Splash, macro, tutorial, photography, how to, at home, Flash, trigger, miops, pluto, tips, tricks, ideas, creative

Id: ngrmvaw5UlM

Length: 36min 45sec (2205 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021