Making a splash

Turning droplets into works of art using flashes

When a liquid lands in another, you may notice a column of liquid appear. If a second drop collides with that, the resulting collision is over so quickly, it’s almost invisible. But if you light those drops with a short flash you open up a world of fascinating shapes. Use coloured liquids against a coloured background, and the permutations are endless.

Stop-motion photography can capture a bullet coming out of a gun, or a balloon bursting but you end up with a technical image, not art. Water drop photography is different! A decade ago it was difficult to capture those collisions, requiring endless patience and some luck, but the advent of microcontrollers, coupled to solenoid-controlled valves, transformed the technique. You can control the size and timing of multiple drops, creating super images – no two are ever the same.

Arranging the camera to capture macro images from the valves producing drops into a bowl requires precision and ingenuity. You need to light the background not the collision itself, to avoid glare. Or, the background can be formed by using lightbox acrylic, which enables light to come through from the speed lights placed behind it.

Tiny apertures produce acceptable depth of field. To produce a short enough flash to successfully freeze movement requires the flash to be set to manual. At 1/64 power, the flash lasts just 33 microseconds.

The first shot was taken in ’06, before micro-controllers, using a home-built laser beam breaker to trigger speed lights and camera. It took a day to set up and capture what became a competition winner. Today, a similar photo can be shot in an hour!

While the first image used just water, the other images also use a thickening agent. The shutter speeds shown are unexpectedly long. The flash sets the exposure time and the shutter has to open long enough to cope with variations in shutter lag, all taken care of by the micro-controller!

Using a pressurized vessel connected to a valve, to create a jet instead of using a drop to do so, increases the controllability and provides stunning midair collisions. The latter images are produced this way.

Shiny Bell is produced against a black background, which is challenging, with side lighting and a higher ISO to compensate for the lack of background light. In Spanish

Lady Dancer, two pressurized jets at an angle produce a collision creating images where viewers can see their own interpretation.