Hi, I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching Adorama TV.
Well today we're in Doug's cooking program but instead of making tacos or steaks or spaghetti
we're gonna cook up some splash photography. This is something you can do
with everything you've got around the house. I'm not a studio guy so I don't
have all the studio equipment, but the challenge here is to to create good
splash pictures using items that I can find either in my camera bag, or in the
garden tool shed, or in the kitchen somewhere. Like you see we've already got
started to get set up, so we've got our bowl where we're going to put our milk and drop our
berry into it, in this case a strawberry or tripod to keep our camera still and
steady. The camera which is a 5D Mk III and a 24 to 70 2.8 zoom lens. Speedlights
and a cable release, so we don't have to touch the camera, and for me I'm using a sync
cord but go wireless if you can, I'm just a bit old-school this way. Tripod first of
course, we need it to be nice and stable, you can snap our camera onto the pod
using the tripod plate on the bottom of the camera, make sure that's on there
good and tight, make sure your tripods good and tight, because it can be
a bit top-heavy so you gotta be careful of this. Now we've got a glass bowl that
we're going to be using, I'm going to put about an inch or two or three of milk in
there too, as our sort of splash liquid. At the moment I've got it on an
old piece of MDF. Now I suggest maybe using a black piece of slate or tile,
might look a little better, but this is what I had to hand and from there I'm
going to set my, I've got my my scrim or my, my reflector, leaning up against the
kitchen tap believe it or not. And in behind I've got my speed light
sitting on top of a ceramic bowl to give it a bit of elevation. Now I'm just going
to be blasting the light through the scrim on to our subject and hopefully giving it
enough light and speed of the light to stop the action. The next important
techie bit is, your shutter speeds, your iso's and your aperture, and we need a fast
shutter speed. We need to stop the action, so I would say up around 1/1000th of
second in terms of f-stop I want some depth of field so I'd like to get 8 I'd
love to get 11but we're not sure about that until we start trying it, ISO I start at 200
and work my way up in order to help with the f-number and the shutter speed
Great, so let's give it a test. Now one critical thing about your speed light is the
amount of power you're gonna use. Best to power the the flash down to about 1/64th
power or even 1/128th, now the reason for this is, first you don't
really need that much power, but the speed of the light coming from the flash
head is much faster and a lower power than it is at full power, therefore its
ability to stop action is better. Now you have to play around with this you have
to try to say - it's 64 then go to 1/128th or 1/32 or 1/16 whatever works for you but the
only way to figure it out is just to try it so I've got this one set at I'm going to
started at 1/64 of a second, now I've also got it set to high speed sync, now most
camera, most flashes will sync it around 1/260 or1/200 but most modern flash heads
will allow you to go to high-speed sync where you can use much faster shutter
speeds. So we're almost all set up for our kitchen countertop splash
photography but before we get started we want to make sure that our exposures are
correct. So I'm just going to take a test shot remember that my flash head is set
to 1/64th of power.
I'm just gonna making sure that my meter is with the cursor in the middle there.
I'll do it, go ahead and take a test shot, and looking at the back of the camera, it looks
ok so I'm set now at 1/800th of a second at f/8 now I've got a really
high iso here. I'm at 6,400 to get that shutter speed any we're almost ready to
go. We are actually ready to go, so we're gonna try our first drop shot and
hopefully we can attain Cartier Bresson''s 'Decisive moment'...
Don't get discouraged when you're doing this stuff, it takes a few attempts. Now
for your focusing make sure your focused properly, so how I do it is I auto-focus
on to my subject, in this case the bowl of milk, and then once I've auto focused
I then switch to manual focus and then I going to live view in the back of the
camera. Zoom into five times just tweak the focus if it needs to be, come back out
of it and that's it, now, you will get some light leakage from the back of the
camera through the eyepiece, so cover it up or something, I'm just going to use my wallet
there.. dead simple. This is it, this is the moment of truth,
here we go
we'll have a quick look see if we got any luck, give it another go,
remember to cover up that eye piece. Now if you are so inclined, you can wipe
the bowl down between between shots but, I'm not that pedantic.
Let's have a look. Looks much better.
Now let me just say that a tool that is absolutely necessary when you're doing this
kind of photography, absolutely necessary, almost more than the camera itself is
the kitchen cloth, to wipe your hands, going to wipe the tops because that splash is gonna get
everywhere.
So there you have it that's my version of kitchen countertop splash photography
using bits and bobs from around the house, garden shed etc thanks I'm Doug McKinlay
for Adorama TV. Don't forget you can subscribe to Adorama TV for more great videos.
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