Continued from previous historical reference-point: How-to stop mothion with a digital camera.
In this part you will see several results of my efforts to freeze the motion of dripping water from our kitchen faucet, using a relatively inexpensive automatic compact digital camera with the built-in electronic flash. In the last post I established how and why any basic electronic flash, common to all digital cameras of every price, is very fast in it's ability to stop motion.
The how-to is really simple. The main things you'll want to do is to eliminate any bright ambient light from natural or artificial sources. You can do this by turning lights off and closing nearby shades. It doesn't have to be dark dark, merely subdue light or by choosing a setting on your camera that will decrease it's use of this unwanted light. One quick way to do this is to set your ISO at a small numerical value, thereby decreasing your camera's sensitivity to light. ISO 100 should be okay, but you may want to experiment with this.
You'll need to focus very closely, so if your camera has a macro setting or wide angle lens, you will want to invoke these features. If it does not, attaching or taping a "close-up" ring over the front of the lens. If you have zoom capabilities be careful not to tape over the lenses in a way that will immobilize this feature. Any photographic close-up ring should work. These are widely available from photography supply stores and online sources, ebay, or as auxiliary attachments to old film cameras. If you dad or grandfather has left you a vintage film camera, odds are that the kit will have one or more close-up rings to attach.
Altough it may require a little more fiddling around to get the best results, a small magnifying glass also may work. (Incidentally, you can also use this method to attach a telescope or small telescopic viewer or binocular to your camera--although this is not what is needed here.) Once you satisfy your curiosity that this will work, and if you want to pursue it further, you would do best to get a close-up ring that's made for this purpose.
You can use a tripod if you wish, but it is not necessary. I did not use a tripod because I wanted to vary the distance and focus quickly. I have an aim in mind of the kind of example that I had seen as a kid of a drop of milk splashing in a bowl of milk. I got this result fairly quickly, plus a lot of other interesting shots. I have included a few of those here.
With ambient light minimized, your camera's automatic settings will probably do just fine, as the flash will automatically choose the fastest setting when used up close. If you get an over-exposed image, characterized by washed-out high-lights, too bright whites, or a generally unusable image due to brightness, you can choose a lower ISO number--or you can use your camera settings, such as shorter shutter speed (higher number) or smaller f/stop (higher number). If your camera offers an EV (Exposure Value) setting, as many of them are now offering, you can choose to lower th EV value so that it darkens the photo. It will automatically do this by invoking one of the following things.
Your camera's back-lighting mode represented by a sun behind a silhouetted image may also work, although it will only go so far--usually one and one-half f/stops, which is equivalent to changing the ISO by one and a half steps.
Don't stress over timing the shot to happen during the actual splash. While this was once a concern--due to the cost of film otherwise expended by trial and error, digital cameras will allow you to randomly shoot without any kind of device or manual attempt to trigger the shot during the splash. Plus, you will get a lot of other images of various stages of the "drip" as seen in some of my photos shown here. Just take lots of pictures and view each one, making necessary corrections according to your understanding of camera controls and/or by merely experimenting. Either way you will better understand your camera, the lens, lighting, macro-photography principles, as well as the object of this post--stopping motion with a speed-light--by the time you are finished.
Two other considerations may effect your settings as well. If you use the highest resolution your camera offers, you will be better able to crop the images and still have a viewable resolution for computer imaging, if not for actual hard prints. If you use lower image resolution settings, you can take more images more quickly and with faster in-camera processing times; lower resolution will also make the time in-between images shorter, but you will need to allow your flash time to recycle if it is required.
Having an extra batter fully charged and ready may also keep your session from being interrupted, as you can expend a fully charged battery during this exercise in no time. Unless you are lacking storage space on your media source, I would not get caught-up in trying to delete images on the fly. Just wait until you are finished and do this either in-camera or on your computer.
Another fun thing to try during this experiment is to use the video VGA function of rapid imaging, but you will then depart from the use of the extreme motion-stopping power of the cameras electronic flash. You will also have a much lower resolution end product. The resulting video, as well as the individual frames this mode captures can also be really cool. You will more likely be able to catch the entire drip process from formation of the drop to the splash and aftermath using the video mode for this one as the flash will not be used due to the speed of the frames being taken. It is fun to compare the two different kinds of results.
A few other scenarios during which I have used speed-lights to freeze motion in my lifetime include catching the "wadding of racing slicks (tires)" of a car upon a rapid start on pavement, my dog drinking out of a glass (a dog's tongue works backward from how you think it would without careful observation or without using speed-lights), Stopping a bullet and an arrow in mid-air (best to use a chronometer fro triggering the image, but this can also be done trail and error), and movements of birds and insects. Use your imagination and feel free to share your results in the comments section within this blog.
Have fun. Ask me questions if you get stumped.
Note: Some of these photos have been colorized in PhotoShop.