Here's a hot topic: How to do splash photography with your MIOPS Splash Kit!
it's gonna be good. Mmm, that is good.
Welcome to our food photography master class. You're gonna learn so much about food take you from beginning to intermediate to even
some advanced techniques here.
We're gonna take you through seven different setups: everything from natural light to using strobe in the studio and show you
how you can use lighting to help tell story in your food photos.
We're also gonna show you all the gadgets and the little tools that you can have in your
studio to help you get those great shots you're looking for click the button
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hi this is JP Morgan here on the slanted lens you might ask yourself what is a
red pepper I have to do with Splash photography?
Actually absolutely nothing, except I'm gonna need a lot of water when I'm done eating my pepper but let's
talk about splash photography. We have always loved the miops triggers here at
the slanted lens from time-lapse to high-speed they just make great devices
scientific devices to freeze motion. Well this new one is a water splash kit the
ability to put a drop and have it splashing the water and to capture that
on your camera and have that be consistent. That's a difficult thing to
do to be able to predict at each time and to be able to capture it not just
the water splashing, but also drops that collide with each other in those kind of
shapes it creates. But not only are we gonna talk about how to do that how to set it up
and to use your splash kit but we're also going to talk about how to light it
at least three different ways to light your water, give you a little different
look each way to make it very predictable in the lighting process as
well so let's get started let's start splashing let's get some splashing going here.
So this is the miops splash kit. this is the world's first bluetooth
controlled water droplet splash kit what we have here is we've got an articulated
arm on the device this articulating arm goes over to either a c-stand or a stand
we're using it with a c-stand just because we wanted to get a little
further over the table here you've got the brain here it's gonna trigger the
drop it's gonna trigger the camera on the strobe I'm gonna get those three to
coordinate with one another to be able get your perfect splash every time so
that's really what this does it's the ability to coordinate those three things
light drop and camera you control all these with just a push of a button here
on your phone or on your iPad and shoot away and once you've got your studies
dialed in you just shoot away and get great images we're going to give you our
settings and the reason we're going to do that is that when you change things
here it changes the whole process so we're gonna give you the height that
we're at the the delays that we used so you can at least give you an area to
start with and get some consistency with and then you can change it up make it
your own do exactly what you want with it so let's just tell you exactly how we
set this up first off we got a great glass bowl and the reason we use this
glass bowl is because it's got a very thin glass edge the depth of the bowl I
don't think it's super critical but it's got to be deep enough that you can get a
nice splash out of it we just found that it was a lot easier when we got the
splash closer to the water and I think right now from the water we're at about
we're almost exactly at eight inches from the water the closer you get this
down the more repeatable your your process is going to be so I think closer
to the water is better so here's the brand of my up setup first off you're
gonna turn it on not with this memory or not yeah we did we got it on and it's
blinking so that means it's on below that we've got a jack for our camera
that's just a mini Jack it's gonna go out to a Canon connection got all those
different cables you get four Canon and four Sony for Nikon we also have a flash
cable here that's going to go to our speed light build a fire our speed light
and then of course right here we've got a little way to test and we can test our
drops test and drop test and drop test and drop so it's a pretty simple device
now we've got to get on the app and to set up the delays to be able to get the
splashes we want and start getting some magic so let's launch our miops app
we're not using the mobile remote we are using the my up splash and there's our
device right there we can select it and connect so there's my first page there's
up to four drops you can add one after the other there's several things we
learned about this first off that first job don't make it too big we went to a
50 for the size of our drop which kind of in the middle so I click on that
you'll see there I see drop size I click on the drop I put 5-0 and when I sweep
down it saves that and I go back up and there's my first drop now if you don't
make the delay and not between the the first and second drop then they're gonna
start to blend together you won't get a second drop and you'll be able to hear
it it'll go click click as it drops the drops one two one two three one two
three four and depending on how many you're releasing so just listen to that
and if then and it does if you're only getting one click it means you don't
have enough of a delay between on the second drop and they're merging together
so I click on my second drop I see that I'm gonna keep the drop size the same 50
that worked out well these are the the settings that we came up with as we
tested this today then I'm gonna sweep over see those two dots I'm gonna sweep
over and I have a delay we found 90 to be a great delay at this
8 inch distance so I'll set that on 90 and I'll sweep down and it's saved we
didn't do a third drop we didn't do a fourth drop now my trigger I don't want
the trigger to go up as the drop is dropping from the dropper I wanted to go
off as the drop hits the water so I gotta have a delay
we played with different delays and the delay we came up was 230 so we go here
we click on to 30 to 3-0 and sweep down and it's saved now that's our our
settings for this setup this distance and the way we've tested the day that
worked out great several things to note one is that like I said before if you
don't have enough delay on that second drop it'll just merge with the first one
another thing is that when you start playing with the delay don't make big
adjustments don't say well 90 was not quite there I'll do 120 make small
adjustments 95 see what that looks like 93 96 make the vet makes them very small
adjustments so you are kind of sneaking up on it because it's a very small area
and so when you make big adjustments it just throws everything out of whack
you'll be chasing your tail you'll never figure it out but just make those small
adjustments so start with this drop size 50 on the first one drop size 50 on the
second one a delay of 90 milliseconds a triggered delay of 230 milliseconds with
your dropper 8 inches from your pool of water something I better mention about
the pool of water don't know if I said it earlier is get it full right to the
very top so that's like an infinity pool so I'm now looking and it's just kind of
gonna fall out of focus in the background you're not gonna see the back
of the of the container that makes it look really nice
here my camera settings 200 ISO f11 because I'm on a 90 millimeter macro
lens it's that Tama on 2.8 90 millimeter so I'm in pretty tight and that means my
depth of field diminishes so I want to have at least f11 to give me enough
depth of field I am also on white balance on strobe and I'm going to put
the shutter on bulb and I'm gonna darken the room so I'm in a dark room and now
when I hit the start on my app it's going to fire the drop and the strobe
and take the picture on my camera in that dark room and it looks fabulous
so let's get to our lighting setups first it's just a strobe on the white
background let's see what that looks like then we're gonna have some gels and
some different lighting and just see what each of those look like we'll just
keep working on it give you different options let's see we got our first light
said it's gonna be the 600 e^x just simply aimed at the white background
behind and what that's going to do is it's going to give us bright nice
looking water but as the water rolls it's going to make deep dark shadows
towards us we'll bring this fill card get it away this light won't be on this
is just for the BTS these lights on the background here will be off that's our
simple first setup so black cloth white background singing strobe first light
here we go
so now we're gonna put a little bit of color into our splash you know you could
use another speed like for this but I don't have another speed light so I do
have an a6 this is the baja version kind of studio version of the baja strobes so
this is an a6 I'm gonna put a red gel on it here this is gonna flare into my
camera so I'm gonna put this right up here I've got to have enough room so
that the light can get through into the bowl here but this can block my lens
there I'm gonna put this on a very low setting almost one or two stops from
being completely dialed down and just shoot a quick shot here and see if we
got but I've got to kill all the lights in the room and see what makes this
happen
okay for this sliding setup what we've done here is we've got a red gel on the
speed light and a green gel here on the Baja just aiming both of those at the
background that just gives us a nice kind of blending to those two colors
together has a very pastel II kind of look not as hard red and green and looks
great lighting the water from behind so let's take a look at some of the images
with the green and the red gel on the white seamless
so we put a speedlight up here with a little red gel on it gave us some red
kind of light in the formations where you little drop formations and that was
cool enough but what really worked is when I put just some old-fashioned red
food coloring in the water so in the water and in the water that creating the
droplets now when it hits that red it gives us a strong red color there then
on the background we put a yellow on our speed light so now I've got a great
yellow with that red juxtaposition that color play is really fun and those look
fabulous in different formations against that color combination
there are so many different color combinations you can come up with just
using that food color for the color of your water and drops and then another
color in the background to give you that juxtaposition so there's a lot of
different examples we've got examples of direct light and indirect light and
colored water just look through those but take all those principles take those
settings and start to play with them and see what you can come up with do some
different things with this there's different applications for it other than
just making splashes in a little bottle splashing up from a spoon not from a
glass the top of a bottle I mean there's just a lot of things you could do to
play with to make this really interesting to give you something kind
of fun put them up on our Facebook group get over on the Facebook group tag and
put the your miops water splash images up there this is just such a great thing
because you can lock yourself in the basement on a really cold winter day and
just splash away and see what you get you know that's the kind of thing you do
by yourself you don't doesn't take a lot of equipment but it's just fun to see
what you come up with so make sure you subscribe to us here on the slanted lens
I want you to be a part of our family and keep those cameras rollin keep on
clickin