OK, so I always wanted to make a "splash" picture. I thought it wouldn't be that hard, but it is, for reasons I'll put in a comment for this post. For my end result I wanted a cookie splashing into coffee - but I'll have to be happy with this water splash I set up as a test... for now!
So what happened here?
ReplyDeleteTo minimize all possible shadows, I choose to shoot a black cup on a white background & floor. Even so, because I don't have external flashes I can set up, I only can rely on the on-camera flash.
This flash started out with lighting the white up unevenly - I could push that away in lightroom a bit, but I wanted it as clean as possible out of the cam, so I improvised a diffuser cap on my flash (actually, it's the top of a device to cook an egg in a microwave... :)
This lit up the scene beautifully, but it is still resulting in shadows (although now way more diffuse than the first attempts) behind the cup, which are impossible to fill in without a secondary light source. I don't have this, and won't for a while, as this is quite a costly piece of equipment.
For the test I didn't use the flash to it's best extent - which is at a 1/125s exposure time - this was only 1/80. Everything higher caused even more distracting "grey" pattern above the cup, which is still visible, even with a lot of lightroom adjustment.
One could also ask, why not push higher than F11 and get everything sharp? That's something I didn't want - I wanted the center of the splash to be in tight focus, and for the drops before and after that to turn unsharp and bokeh like - Also here I made a mistake as the sharpness is on the front of the cup. The right thing to do would have been to put a ruler in the middle of the cup and manually focus on this. I didn't go back to do this as the drops here seem small. I hope that coffee will stick together in fatter drops (I'll add a lot of sugar?)
Anyway, this exercise will only be repeated when I get my hands on a flash or two. Unfortunately, this is not the time to invest in such things.