Flosse’s IT corner

After watching several videos around the net I figured I would setup a shot of running water splashing.

Honestly it is not hard and the results are actually quite passable for a first shot. Here is what you need in order to make a successful shot:

1. a location with a fairly neutral backdrop

2. a situation you want to shoot. In my case water pouring into a glass as it is just about to overflow.

3. a midrange Digital SLR camera, “point and shoot” compacts are probably too slow in the shutter speed.

4. light.. lots of it. I used standard IKEA clip on lights to put around the place.

5. a tripod to steady the camera while you pour water.

First you need to pour the glass with about 5mm below the brim. Next all you need to do is set up the camera in a slightly downward angle so that you can see the actual surface of the water in the glass. In my case I set the camera up with the following settings:

Aperture: F 5.6

ISO: 100

Shutter: 1/180th of a sec.

Flash: built in flash fired at 1/4th of the strength

Focal length: 42mm

Lens: Olympus 14-42mm

Auto Focus: Continuos with manual (more on that later)

These will give you a nice picture of the full glass with the surroundings. There is a saying, always shoot a little more and it is true you can always crop the image but you can make it contain more things.

Once you are setup fire a few test shots to see if the lighting is good and if the focus is correct. Set your focus point to the middle of the water surface and leave it. The reason why you want continuos auto focus is so that the camera will not adjust once there are other movements in the image.

Once set, pour the water from a height of about 10 cm above the glass, so that it is just outside the frame. you need to practice shooting simultaneous as you pour but after a few trials it will work . The resulting image is nowhere near your end result as you can see here:

Please note that this image is resized from 10mpix to a with of 1024 pixels.

Next we open Photoshop or any other photo manipulation software and crop the part that we want which results in this:

That looks already very nice but we want to bring the edges out and the contrast a bit more. Instead of adjusting the contrast back and forward, I prefer to add a soft light and play with that. to do so, open Photoshop, and open the image, then add a solid color layer in the layer palette and pick black as a color:

Lastly set the layer mode to Soft Light and adjust the opacity of that Soft Light layer. The result is a nice darkened and contrasty picture that looks very pretty indeed:

If you want to play with the file and try this out, you can mail me and I will provide you with a download link of the original RAW file.