I read a lot of tech blogs and one that I read occasionally has “Shooting Challenges” that ask readers to submit their shots for the week’s challenge. They have a variety of different shooting challenges such as different lighting conditions, camera tricks, and pretty much anything you can do with a camera. Last week’s challenge was shooting water drops. I didn’t see the challenge until it was already over so I didn’t submit it to the contest. But it sounded like something I could tackle. So within 10 minutes of reading the challenge, I was taking photos. I love these contests because its amazing to see how talented a lot of photographers are out there. One that I am practicing to be. Check out a few shots that I made.

The materials I used were:

• 2 x Tripods – One for the camera and one for the flash
• 1 x Remote flash hotshoe extension
• 1 x Black container to hold the water
• 1 x Colored background
• 1 x Table
• 1 x Kitchen syringe
• Water
• Patience

Getting the shots right took a lot of trial and error and in total I probably took about 100 photos, until my flash ran out of batteries. From the 100 photos, I got about 6 nice shots, seen below. What made it difficult was that I didn’t have a large enough container to hold the water so I had to bring the camera really close to the splash zone. This makes the focus plane really thin and many shots were just out of focus. But I suppose that for my first water drop photoshoot, it turned out to be a huge success and I had fun doing it.

Update 5/17/2010:

The results of that week’s shooting challenge were just posted. Check out everybody’s submission to the challenge in the links below. There were some really creative shots, I’ll probably try to replicate some of them for fun. I’ll post more when I get around to it.

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