The Photog Formula

Living 15 minutes from the Big Horn Mountains is awesome. I can take a short drive and be surrounded by pine trees, breath fresh air, and have infinite possibilities for great photos.

A friend of mine called this morning wanting to know if I wanted to go up the canyon for some whitewater rafting.  Do I?  Of course!  I loaded my gear and in less than 30 minutes I was at the site ready to take some great photos.

I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I did taking them!  They were all processed in Lightroom 2 with various presets.

Last night my wife and I experimented with some high-speed photography. Well, not super high-speed, but we got the effect we were after.

I wanted to try and capture an ice cube falling into a glass of water. My space is limited here in the house, something I hope to correct soon. So we set everything up on the dining room table.

I put down a piece of white foamcore and then a piece of plexiglass. I have a table-top lightbox that I used as the backdrop. The glass filled with water went in the center of the glass. That was pretty much it for that part.

Now came the hard part, lighting.

I knew I had to get as much lighting as possible to allow for a faster shutter speed. After quite a bit of playing and testing, we finally got what we were looking for. The following diagram illustrates how this was done:

The two strobes fired at roughly 45 degrees of the subject. But I wasn’t getting the backdrop lit like a wanted. So I added one of the lights that came with the table-top lightbox kit and lit the backdrop.

If you’ve ever attempted this type of photography, you know that it takes more than just a couple of shots to get it right!

I think we took around 100 or so shots to get just a couple that I could live with. Timing is crucial in doing this, and either I fired the shutter too soon or my wife dropped the ice too late. We finally got the timing right and were able to get a few cool shots.

Then I wanted to try something different, something I hadn’t seen before. So I grabbed one of my kids’ Lego men to see if we could get him “diving” into the water.

Being that he was so light, when he hit the water he moved quite a bit. The shot over on Phototerium.com was my favorite, but I wished he was facing the camera. Oh well.

Here are a few more that I liked as well:

If you ever try this on your own, be patient! It won’t happen in one take. It probably won’t even happen in a few dozens takes! (Unless you have some expensive high-speed photo equipment!)