Upde Designs

I know I told you on Thursday that I would post on Friday some of the flood images I made.  Obviously after seeing the wonderful job the Telegraph Herald did in covering the flood I was ashamed of the meager effort I had so nothing worthy showing compared to what you can see in the paper or on line with the TH-Online.

So today I decided to practice some more Macro Photography.  I took a lesson on shooting water drops and after spending close to an hour just setting up I was disappointed that my results were less than spectacular.

They always make it look so easy on the video and they get wonderful results.  But it’s like anything else it takes lots of practice and patience to get the kind of shots that make people say “WOW!”

Basically here is what was involved capturing these images.  First I had to get Jeanne’s broiler pan from the store room.  Fill it with water and for lack of a better place set it on some foam core over the sink.  Then put a sheet of foam core behind the pan of water to bounce the flash off of.   Set the Nikon SB900 flash with a Pocket Wizard II  on a light stand and set it on manual power 1/64^th.  Bounce the flash off the foam core into the water.

Next I shot with the Nikon D700 set on manual mode and manual focus.  I used a Tamron 90 mm 1:1 Macro Lens and shot with ISO 200 at 1/125 sec @f8.0 manual focus,   I put the camera in high burst mode.  Next I hung a sandwich bag of water over the pan of water and put a small pin hole in it so I could get a consistent water drop pattern.

Then I manually focused the lens where the water was dripping using a knife as a focal point.  Then I turned off the lights and fired away to the tune of 200 images to get the three you see here.

Enjoy your weekend.  Thanks for stopping by and be cool and careful.