Photos of items dropping into water (or other liquids) always have the potential to fascinate — the dramatic splashdown, the explosion of flying droplets frozen in time. They’re also increasingly seen in commercial images — look in your local supermarket and there’s a high probability you’ll find an image of a strawberry, chili pepper, or banana hitting the water, captured by a high-speed flash.
Together with a photographer buddy of mine (like me, a physicist by training), I spent several long evenings trying to take great ‘”water action” photos. We had some success, but we were doing it the hard way. This photo was one among hundreds we took in a single night — the vast majority of them showed the cube not in the water yet, or too deep in the water.
In this project we’ll show you how to take perfect splash photos, the easy way—by precisely timing the dropping of the object and the triggering of the flash, using an Arduino microcontroller board.
Getting the Moment Right
There are three elements in getting high-speed splash pictures right:
- Using a flash to “freeze the action” Modern electronic flashes emit light for only a very small fraction of a second (less than 1 millisecond). If the room is otherwise dark, this will freeze the action.
- Planning the shot What happens, where’s the camera, how does the lighting work, in detail?
- Getting the moment right This is the real trick. Before building this project, we relied on trial and error, somewhat along the lines of:
a. Drop object
b. Do a mental count of how long it’ll take for the object to hit the surface
c. Manually release the flash
d. Pray for a “hit”
Having played with Arduino a bit, we wondered whether we could take the guesswork out of getting the moment right, and after a lot of tinkering we came up with the rig explained here. We’re now able to get the moment right in a repeatable fashion, thanks to an electromagnetic solenoid controlled by an Arduino Uno.
It’s not hard to build, but you’ll need to scrounge the parts from various sources and do some experimenting to get the rig configured right (more trial and error). Our description here is not very precise (by design) as your parts and photography needs may vary. But hopefully it’s good enough that you get the idea and start making!
- PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS: Thomas Burg and Johannes Gottwald
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. it’s by-far the nicest-work I have ever had . I started this 7-months ago and straight away began to make at least $82 p/h . try this out MORE DETAIL HERE
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< col Hiiiiiii Friends….upto I saw the draft ov $8289 , I accept that my father in law woz trully earning money parttime from there labtop. . there moms best frend has been doing this for only about 8 months and recently cleard the mortgage on there house and purchased a new Dodge . linked here HERE’S MORE DETAIL
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< col Hiiiiiii Friends….upto I saw the draft ov $8289 , I accept that my father in law woz trully earning money parttime from there labtop. . there moms best frend has been doing this for only about 8 months and recently cleard the mortgage on there house and purchased a new Dodge . linked here HERE’S MORE DETAIL
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I found that the Neewer branded off camera shoe cords are excellent for projects like these because they are designed to be modular within Neewer’s parts. What this means for you and I is that both end are held together with simple screws and come apart easily and inside, there are 0.1″ headers that you can attach to to get access to the individual pins so you don’t need to cut cables to get access to lines that you want.
Hi Thomas and Johannes! We would like to cover this project on EEWeb.com. Kindly drop me a message on my business email add: cexclamador.eeweb@gmail.com. I’ll be looking forward to your message. Thanks.
How about using infrared light sensor for such kind of photography? E. g. emitting diode and receiving sensor are placed on opposite sides of water tank in about 10 inches above the surface. You just drop any object into water and when it passes the sensor, it triggers the action by reducing the amount of infrared radiation. Such principle seems to be more flexible.
I did that — used an Adafruit beam breaker and Arduino to control the flash. I also inserted a potentiometer in the circuit, so that I could adjust the flash timing without having to enter values and reload the “sketch.”
This is an excellent project that I’m planning on trying over the Christmas. Thanks for the detailed instructions. My only question is, how come the photos don’t come out blurred with such a long exposure (3-secs)? Shouldn’t the camera capture the whole movement leaving trails of the falling object?
Do you happen to have any updates about driving the camera shutter with the relay? Will a regular Impact Shutter Release Cable connected to the bottom-left ports work?
Merry Christmas to all!
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