Photo of the Day – Teacup Splash

Last week, I posted a shot of some water drops after I was inspired by this strobist post on how to photograph water drops. I liked my results, but I was pretty sure I could do a bit more with it.

So, in the interest of pushing myself, I thought, “No, I don’t have to just drop water…”

Here’s my favourite shot. Click to see it larger:

I stuck with a liquid theme, but rather than just dropping some liquid, how about a container for liquid? And rather than just have said container simply ricochet off its landing surface (a piece of black perspex, in this case), how about it lands on the saucer that would normally accompany it? Smashing.

On reflection, I could have dropped the cup and saucer together, but I had a couple reasons for dropping the cup onto the saucer. First, it made a good target – I could line the saucer up in camera and be sure that if I hit it with the cup, it would be in the frame. Second, I was working by myself and had to both trigger the camera (with a little remote button) and drop the cup. Adding a saucer into that equation might have made things a bit too cumbersome for me.

I like both the overall composition and the details of this shot: the off-centre cup, the sexy splash coming out the left side, the surreal splash rising upward that looks like it was being poured, the large shard on the left that is rising just off the surface, the pulverized mess beneath the cup, the random little fragment escaping in the top right…

I ended up doing about eight to 10 of these shots in one morning. Each smash lasted a fraction of a second. If only the cleanup lasted that amount of time.

Lighting info: One sb-800 on 1/16th power below the set and aimed at the background. Another at camera right and above on a very low power (I think it may have been right down to 1/128th). A bounce card at left of the teacup to fill.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 6:54 am. It is filed under Blog, Photography and tagged with high speed photography, Photography, strobist, studio photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.