Solid Crown in the Making

I would like to say that making this short stop frame was a labour of love but after shooting it 3 times I'm sick of the sight of it LOL

 

This is my second waterdrop animation the first one was The Life of a Waterdrop Collision, and I had always planned on doing a couple more, this however wasn’t one of the ones that I had in mind; but work had asked me if I could shoot a cut scene that they could use in a video, one of the specs was white on black so that they could add colour at a later date.

 

The first sequence of stills that were shot had a problem with the timing of the flash guns so the whole video had a horrible motion blur to it and the second sequence that I shot was very rushed and I kept knocking the tripod so the alignment of the drops kept changing.

 

Anyone who does this sort of photography will be well aware how painstaking drops on a solid surface can be… the cleanup in between each shot is so mind numbing and yet it has to be done methodically enough so that all of the oil that the cream leaves and debris are removed.

 

This sequence is made of 140 individual stills (although in reality I shot over 200) with each one roughly 1ms apart, it was shot with a birds eye view POV and the camera in portrait (this is the reason why the drops at the beginning are out of focus). The stills were then brought in to iMovie and converted into a HD video… unfortunately I couldn’t keep the portrait aspect ratio as the only output options were 16:9 or 4:3.

 

After spending so much time on this I’m going to have some time away from the computer I’ve caught up with everyone’s streams (and if I haven’t I will do) so have a great week all!!

 

Lens: Canon 100mm Macro

Flash Guns: 4 x Yongnuo 560 MKII

AV f/16

TV Bulb

ISO 400

 

Trigger with a Arduino, you can find details of my setup here, albeit a little out of date

Done