Making a Splash

I finally found some time to time to play around with my new flashgun. I wanted to test it out taking some water splash / drop shots.

Not a particularly fancy set up - just filled a pint glass with water, placed in the kitchen sink and got the tap to drip. I used a sheet of A4 paper behind the bowl for the background.

As you can see in the picture below, the result was ok but was not what I was aiming for as the background was all wrong.



So, I then reset the tripod to put the camera at the same height as the top of the glass and tried again. This was better (although the focusing was off) but still not what I was looking for.



So, I then added a blue Rosco photo gel filter (another recent purchase) to the flashgun and tried again. I was a little happier with the results. The focusing could still be better and I was using the built in camera flash to trigger the flashgun which was off camera to the right which is why there is a mixture of white and blue light plus the white streaks and shadows with the drops in the last 2 shots. Still a lot of work to do to get some results that I'll be really pleased with but not too bad for a first attempt with a basic setup.

New Flashgun

I have been wanting to get hold of a flashgun for some time now as I'm an avid reader of Strobist.com and also fans of various flickrites that use off camera flashguns to create some excellent and artistic effects.

I really wanted a Canon flashgun but both the Canon Speedlite 580EX and the 430EX are currently out of my price range so I thought I'd get a 3rd party one which I can always use as a slave in the future when I can afford more than one!

So, on a bit of an impulse purchase I bought a Nissin Di622 Canon compatible flashgun. I'm fairly pleased with it so far although haven't played with it too much yet. The only disappointment is that it is not compatible with cheap ebay wireless flash controllers. So, for off camera flash I need to trigger it with the cameras built in flash or manually press a button on the gun! This is mainly a problem as you may not always want light on the subject from the front. Still, I'm working on a cheap solution which may avoid this but long term my plan is to get at least one more flashgun then that can be used to trigger the Nissin.