A few shots from the weekend, using the flash to freeze water droplets striking the surface of a mango. The use of the mango is purely for the textures. The background didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped: we have a composite work surface in the kitchen which is flecked with highly reflectively pieces of mineral, and I’m confident that my wife would shoot me if I coloured them in with a black marker :).

1/5 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

1/5 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

1/10 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

1/5 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

I think this is my favourite:

1/13 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

I may have another attempt at this: ideally I’d like to get full diameter of the splash pattern into focus, which means pushing the aperture a lot deeper. The main problem was that the ambient light was much too low, even at F8. Another problem I had in an earlier attempt was with the water leaving distorted trails on the image, as there was just enough light across the shutter setting to be exposed, above and beyond what the flash was freezing. I was going to try second curtain, to see if that would help and decided it wouldn’t, so went for the less technical solution of changing where the water droplet landed.

The nice dark, graduated background is the back of my iMac. This lens is a very nice, gotta be said…

2.5 secs at f20, ISO 100 at 100mm

15 secs at f32, ISO 100 at 100mm

3.2 secs at f32, ISO 100 at 100mm

3.2 secs at f32, ISO 100 at 100mm

1/20 sec at f2.8, ISO 100 at 100mm

0.6 sec at f11, ISO 100 at 100mm

This is my first flash experiment with the mate’s 100mm macro. Not one ounce of originality, plus the model [later liberated to the back yard] probably wouldn’t thank me for the experience, but I’m actually pretty pleased. The earlier shot with the long exposure stood me in good stead for getting a feeling of what I could do with depth of field. This was at minimum focal distance though, plus as far as I could push the aperture:

1/60 sec at f22, ISO 100 at 100mm

I had the flash angled fully forward, and used the catchlight panel to try to bounce a modest amount of light down to the subject.

This was the best of about 5 shots I took handheld. I’ve seen some shots the mate who owns the lens has take of a fly’s eye, showing the compound lenses, which he does in conjunction with some extension tubes. It must have been an act of extreme patience, given that the depth of field must have been about a millimetre deep.