Results are better, but not perfect yet:

Everything is mounted to this aluminium ladder. On the top you can see the dripping device and its battery. Below there is a frame with a key-chain laser and a detector on the opposite side. On the bottom there is a tray filled with water. The water is red because I used some food ink for the droplets. Beside the tray there is a cheap flash from eBay. Its power/speed can be set manually. It works in a slave mode and triggered by another flash which I mined from a disposable camera. This second flash is fixed to the arm of the chair and connected to the controller. It does not effect the lighting too much. It is for triggering the other flash only. In front of the tray there is my camera on a tripod. On the right side of the tray there is the controller I built. I used the box of an old streamer.

Anyway, yesterday I had a new shooting session with a different lighting setup. As I planned, this time I didn’t shoot in a dark room. Basically I switched on the lights in the room. I decreased the power of the flash, which also means that I increased the speed. I also used a smaller aperture. It was 13 or 11. Unfortunately even with the room lights on there was not enough light. I didn’t want to compromise in the speed and or the aperture, so I increased the ISO speed first to 200 and later to 400. This way I had good exposure, but as you might guess I introduced quite significant thermal noise to the picture. I use a quite old camera (Canon D60) and I always get some noise if I use ISO 400 sensitivity. Probably newer cameras are better, but I have to live with this. Here are some samples from this shooting:

(Click on the image)

As you can see the quality is not much better with this setup. The focus is better, but the same time I lost some detail. I guess it is because of the ambient light and/or because of the noise reduction in the post processing of the images. I have to figure out some other way of lighting. Any ideas?

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…

So I started to learn digital photography and I run into some splash photos on the Internet. I was amazed, and I was curious how one can make such photo. Soon I was learning about high speed photography techniques. I was hooked. It requires some electronic gadgets and even better one can use microcontrollers to build such devices. Yes, you are right! That is also one of my hobbies So I had a “good” reason to start to build a microcontroller based device. As I was looking for the right controller I found arduino. Now, that is something cool. You have to check that if you are interested in microcontrollers. It is an Atmel based stuff that you can program via USB. It has a very nice programming environment and works like a charm. Here is their homepage.

The target is the following: I build a standalone device with

• LCD screen, menu,
• some push buttons for controllig the device itself,
• output for laser control,
• input for laser detector,
• input for microphone,
• output for camera shutter control,
• output for flash,
• output for dripping device control,
• timing control,
• sensitivity control.

I’m almost ready with it. Only thing that is missing is the dripping device. I already ordered a solenoid water valve from e-bay, so I will also have that soon. When I’m ready with the device I will post some pictures about it.

Before this device I built a small audio detector based circuit. I managed to take some acceptable pictures, but I want to go for better quality.

Here are some examples from others:

http://www.liquidsculpture.com/fine_art/index.htm

http://courses.ncssm.edu/hsi/pacsci/student_photos.html

http://www.backtoessentials.com/inspiration/35-examples-of-high-speed-photography/