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I’m back to blogging. Since my last post I managed to finish my high speed photography controller. I also built the dripping device and I took some test photos. The machine works surprisingly well. I can control the water drops, laser, flash and shutter of the camera in sync. In my next post I will upload some pictures about my messy setup and the controller device itself. Here is a test image:

As you can see I have some blurring problem. It is coming from the light and camera settings plus the objective I used. It is not the fault of the controller. The problem is quite complex. I made this image in a completely dark room. The controller opened the camera shutter and the exposure was made by the flash only. This way I can make faster exposures than the maximum shutter speed of my camera. My flash could do about 1/20000 .  Nice theory but with such a high flash speed you get very dim light. What you can do? Make the flash slower, or open the aperture. If the flash is too slow the drops will blur (motion blur). If the aperture is larger you loose the depth of field and it will be really hard to focus. The edges of the image also tend to blur. This is what you can see on this picture. The top of the central form is not sharp and the droplets out of the depth of field are also blurred.

In my next photo session I will try some other way to enhance the exposure. I will introduce some ambient light instead of the completely dark room. The ideal would be to add more flash devices or a more powerful one, but I have only one where I can control the speed, so I will try the ambient light instead.

BTW, I activated commenting again, so feel free to write what you think…