One of the most interesting and fun photography project is high speed photography. Capturing liquids like water, milk, wine, beer, or any kind of liquor can easily be transformed from just a plane liquid or product in your fridge or bar, in to a pretty spectacular shot.

​

   Now, before getting started; there are some things to take into consideration.

​

   First, you need to know what equipment you might want to use. A small inflatable pool depending on the size of your splash image would work ideal. You don't want that purple coloured water or red milk drops all over your room floor, so it would be wise to keep this pretty much as contained as possible. A tripod would also come handy at this kind of situation where you want to already have framed your image and just experiment with the speed you through the liquid, the movement of your hands or even different cups. If you are using flash, (strobes, studio lights or speed lights), you'd probably want some kind of diffuser (a soft box with a soft box grid as it could be quite useful when you want to direct the light or spotlighting). A coloured backdrop, some flash gels, wireless remote shutter release, tethering tools or Eye-fi cards are all in your favour at that point and despite of not being essential to your shooting, they could easily add a more personal touch to the final image and more important, let you focus on just your creativity (and luck).

​

   The second thing to take into consideration is wether you want to shoot with natural light or you would prefer to go with artificial lighting. There are two ways to capture liquids and both of them work out fine. One, would be without any artificial lighting. This would require no further action than framing your subject on the available light source (block some of the extra light if needed using flags or v-flats) and only playing around with your splash techniques until you get a crispy detailed breathtaking splash image. You would probably want to use f8-f9 or even smaller apertures, in order to get the right depth of field. Set the shutter speed from around 1/2.000 or 1/4.000 and you are pretty much ready for action.

​

   When shooting with strobes in a studio it is a bit more tricky. First thing is to take a test shot which is a completely black image. Don't be surprised; thats exactly what we want. We want to make sure that none of the ambient light in the room is affecting the shot. We want all of the lighting to be coming from the light(s) that we are actually using to light the scene. Usually we tend to light water, wine or beer from the back of the liquid and milk from the front side. What's really important is to capture the image with crisp fine detail of the splash, even on the edges of the frame. That will require two things. One is a high aperture number. The more depth of field in your picture, the more detailed will be. Don't even bother using wide apertures like 1.8, 2.8 or even 5.6 if you want your splashes to be crispy sharp from edge to edge. Start from your lens's sweet point and go from there. Usually an aperture of f9 and above will do the trick (assuming you have enough flash power to back it up). Strobe  manufacturers use a measurement like T1 and T5 in order to describe the flash instant power.