This is my general setup for all these shots
My second shot I want to talk about in this series is one that I have titled Pawn Rising (H/T Sis for the title). I started this shot to get something to turn in for a closed competition with the Fort Worth Camera Club. The subject for this contest was wet. I had originally thought about trying to get some water drops on a piece of glass and shot through it to get an image of what I put under the glass. Like those here. I tried glycerin instead of Rain-X and it just didn’t work so I moved onto plan B.
I have always liked shots of water dripping into water so I setup something I thought would work. Basically I taped a zip lock bag to a walking stick I had and placed it on top of the cabinets of my computer desk. Below this I placed a clear Pyrex dish half filled with water. I started off without any background just to get things dialed in. To get the focus dialed in I started the drops by poking a hole in the bag and placed a pencil where the drops were falling and focused on that.
With the focus set I set up the backgrounds. For these I used some scrapbook paper that I picked up at Hobby Lobby. I placed on sheet under the dish and one behind it. I then setup my flash aimed at the paper behind the dish. The idea is that the flash will bounce off the background and light up the rest of the scene. I played around with various poser settings on the flash and if I remember right I ended up using about 1/8th power. To trigger the flash I was using the cactus V5 radio triggers that my sister got me for my birthday.
I setup up the camera with my 55-250 IS lens. If I do this again sometime I will probably use a macro lens to allow me to get closer to the water than I could with this lens. For shutter speed I used the sync speed for my camera which for the Canon XSi is 1/250th of a second and an aperture of F 8. With all that done I turned off the lights and started taking pictures changing backgrounds every so often. After about 400 shots I stopped and started editing. Of the 400+ shots around 50 came out and about 10 were quite spectacular. More can been seen here in my water set on Flickr.