Hello everyone! This is your facility manager, Wenjun, writing once again. Thank you for all who came to our high speed photography meeting. If you missed the meeting or want to review, here is everything we talked about.

High speed photography is not something mysterious and far away from us. In fact, we do it all the time as we shoot. If you are getting a clean, sharp photo of an athlete running on track, soccer player slide tackling on the field, or fish jumping out of water; then, you are already doing high speed photography! It is essentially setting your shutter speed to a certain “fastness” so that you can “freeze” time in your photo. For example, with 1/1000s in this sample photo, you can see water splashes freezes in the air as the flightless penguins finally become “airborne.”

However, you do not necessarily need 1/1000s to freeze time. Most of the time, 1/125s to 1/200s is all you will need most of the time. For an outdoor environment with large apertures (Small F number), a typical shutter speed will end up around 1/1000 with ISO 100. Put in simple terms, we can generally use any setting that we are used to for high speed photography while we are outdoors. There is almost no limitation in bright light, except that we need to keep shutter fast for “high speed”. You can see the sample photo above that we may achieve incredible results with super faster shutter speed while out there on a zodiac.

But our meeting today is a little special - we are photographing water droplets. Their beauty is ephemeral and stunning. It is difficult to capture that exact poetic movement. However, we brought the best imaginable gear we could acquire for our meeting to capture the moment. This makes the environment today a “controlled environment” - an indoor environment with various factors under our control. With the help of extra LEDs and external flash, we can attempt to seize the moment of the droplet hitting the water surface that generally results in a corona shaped splash.

High Speed Water Droplet Photo. Photo by Wenjun Ning.

Before we begin our imagination, we need to start realistically and analyze what can help us to achieve the best result efficiently. Photographing droplets is a repetitive task which usually involves luck if entirely done by hand (like the photo above). So to maximize our odds, we need several tools to help us. First, we will need a lens with macro features - a macro lens can focus incredibly close up to the object, this can create a miniaturized vibe in the photo and dramatize the scene. Secondly, we will need a tripod. A steady platform for shooting droplets is necessary because it keeps the camera stable on a consistent basis, especially when we need precise manual focus, the camera will have to stay in the same spot. Thirdly, we will need a shutter release cable, or a remote, to operate the shutter without making the camera shake or cause unnecessary delay. Droplets disappear in matters of a few milliseconds and we want to minimize the delay as much as we can to get consistent results. Finally, external frontal flash will help us add a touch of reflection on the droplets and can prevent blurriness. Water droplets have smooth surface, but it will be blurry in the environment of insufficient lighting.

After this, a basic station for high speed photography is completed. Now we need to find the correct focus. The way I do it is to test where the droplets will land first, then I use a tangible, non-transparent object to complete the focus. Pre-focus manually and keeping lens at manual mode is necessary so that the camera waste no time focusing while you pressed down the shutter button. After that, you can simply use pipette and food dye for fancier effects in the water. Do keep in mind that fully hand operation will not be perfect. There could be human error, there could be bad pipettes, there could be a delay at camera. You simply need to repeat the process then pick the perfect photo out of all. Patience is key.

We did have a fancy electronic trigger provided at the meeting - the “Pluto Trigger”. It is essentially an electronically controlled shutter release with various sensors at its aid. In our case, we have a “Pluto Valve” to aid our progress. It gets triggered by a signal sent by the trigger, then the valve opens, releases the droplet, and the trigger releases the camera shutter at the same time for a perfectly controlled shot, as accurate as 1 millisecond!

With such advanced features, we can achieve even more stunning results. Such as the moment where two droplets “kissing” each other in the air - one second less the droplets will not touch, and one second more the droplets will break. This is very hard to achieve purely by hand. However, the machine makes it easy. You do have to test all the numbers on the Pluto Trigger App on your photo. I do recommend the setting shown below. Do change the ‘flash delay’ as necessary because that depends on the height of the valve. All other values can stay the same.

You can get very creative in the ways you capture things at high speed. You can try capturing nerf bullets as it travels through a screen of water. You can try seizing the moment where fire is put out by water mist. You can do many many things if you understand the tricks and techniques of high speed photography correctly. So go out and explore the endless possibilities!

Also, thanks to Joshua Ruan for taking some behind the scenes photos from our meeting.