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Posted on 23/03/18 7:51:32 PM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply  |
How I'm wasting my time
HI Just thought I'd show I'm still alive. Here is a photo of what I have been playing with. Using a Pluto Trigger and valve. 
_________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 23/03/18 7:54:52 PM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
How I'm wasting my time
_________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 23/03/18 8:26:44 PM |
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GKB
Magical Montagist Posts: 3716 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Nice to see you back on the forum Vibeke. I’ve always loved high speed photography and yours is no exception- very nice. _________________  |
Posted on 24/03/18 00:38:18 AM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Thank you Gordon. _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 24/03/18 07:24:23 AM |
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Nick Curtain
Model Master Posts: 1768 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Fabulous image Vibeke. Nick |
Posted on 24/03/18 10:12:07 AM |
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Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 2808 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Stunning image Vibeke. What's a Pluto Trigger? |
Posted on 24/03/18 6:30:21 PM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
https://plutotrigger.com/, it's a little gadget that can be used to trigger the camera. can be set to stars, lightening, sound, time lapse etc. It comes with a laser light that can also be used. The valve for the drops is sold seperate. _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 25/03/18 4:52:27 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 4927 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Very impressive. Lovely work! I used to do this a lot in the eighties in 35mm movie. It needed huge heavy cameras and powerful lighting. It was a very expensive and difficult undertaking. Now there are highly sensitive and lightweight digital cameras which make it all much simpler and have cut by four or five times the amount of light needed. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 25/03/18 8:04:28 PM |
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Steve Caplin
Administrator Posts: 6833 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Beautiful. There's a Friday Challenge in there somewhere, screaming to get out... |
Posted on 26/03/18 04:38:15 AM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Thank you Steve, You can find some more of my drops here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vibeke/albums/72157690319229611 If any of them appeal, you are welcome to use them for a challenge. _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 26/03/18 12:30:18 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 4927 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Absolutely stunning Vibeke!! Are these done with a water bath or a very thin water film on a glass sheet? _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 26/03/18 4:23:00 PM |
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Steve Caplin
Administrator Posts: 6833 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Those are absolutely gorgeous. Amazing work! |
Posted on 26/03/18 5:47:47 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 4927 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Another question. Do you use a strobe light to set up your rig? _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 27/03/18 1:12:42 PM |
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Jota120
Ingenious Inventor Posts: 2615 Reply  |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Fascinating. I wouldn't have expected some of those. An interesting tool to enable those and some of the other features it supports. |
Posted on 27/03/18 6:26:45 PM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Thank you, The green ones are water with a little Guam gun, the pink ones have some milk added. I'm just using an external flash set to 1/64 power. If my background is light, I aim the flash at that, with a dark background I aim my flash at the drops. Usually have the drops dropping into a shallow container. My set up 
_________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 27/03/18 7:00:45 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 4927 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
For all it's homemade aspects this is impressive. Exactly what you need. I will come back to you in the next couple of days on how we did this for movie. Some of it might be applicable to your setup. If you will permit me a tiny suggestion, when shooting on black try putting the flash behind, just peeking over the top of the black card backing, as a backlight. This can work with the flash open and direct or with some diffusion (tracing paper works well) between the flash and the subject to soften it. Alternatively, for soft light, bounce the flash off the white card as you are doing and just put a tiny black card behind the action. Backlit drops against black can be truly magical! I think for very slightly milky drops it could be really sensational. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 27/03/18 8:05:18 PM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Thanks, I'm always grateful for suggestions, so much to learn. _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 01/04/18 9:34:53 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 4927 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Hi again Vibeke As promised here is a little bit (well actually quite a big bit) about how we used to do high speed in the old days for movie. I used to do a lot of professional high speed photography in the ‘eighties (half a lifetime ago) when it was all done on film. Nowadays it is almost entirely digital and there are wonderful cameras available with very high sensitivities and speeds. For still photography this fascinating field is now open to anyone ready to invest the time and in a certain amount of modest specialised equipment - as indeed your wonderful work has shown us all! The old high speed movie cameras ate up a lot of film very quickly. The 2000 frames per second Photosonics that I used most of the time was developed for NASA. It was a huge beast with two motors that needed a 380V three phase supply at 60 amperes. It weighed about 50 kilos. The lens will give you an idea of scale. The Mickey Mouse 'ears' of the film magazine were about 40cm in diameter each. Not a very compact camera! One of the reasons it was so massive was quite simply not to pull itself apart under the strain of its own mechanisms. Once up to speed the film was travelling through it at an astonishing 200km per hour. It consumed a thousand feet of 35mm film in seven and a half seconds! That’s eleven minutes of projection time. The first four and half seconds were used getting the camera up to speed and the last three were available for the action. Here it is ...... 
The fastest available film stock at that time was 100 ASA Eastmancolour negative so vast amounts of light were needed as well for the 10,000/1 of a second exposure time. Typically in the region of 60,000 - 100,000 watts. That means a big generator as that kind of power simply isn’t available connecting to the mains supply. When you concentrate that much light into a small area it’s a huge amount of heat as well, so evaporation and drying out of the liquids was a real problem too. This is another reason high speed video is preferable as sensitivities of up to 1800ASA are available. A few of these old film cameras still exist and are used today occasionally but they are very cumbersome so video has become preferable. Apart from being so much simpler the quality is far superior with 4K digital cameras. Needless to say working like this was horribly costly so we needed methods to try and set things up beforehand so we knew what we would be photographing. You could hardly keep using up thousand foot rolls of colour film just to see if might work ….. and of course you had to wait till the next day for the film to be developed and printed overnight to see the results. One of the tools we used for setting up has long since disappeared and I have been unable to find any trace of it on the web. It was an 8mm high speed analysis camera that used Polaroid movie cassettes. It wasn’t built by Polaroid themselves but used Polaroid movie film. It was built for engineers to trace faults in fast moving machinery. Polaroid movie never took off commercially because it was horribly grainy and contrasty. The film was contained in a light proof cassette which you simply snapped into the camera. Once it had been exposed it was put into a special developer/viewer which took three minutes to develop it and then would then back project it onto a tiny screen. It shot at 300 frames per second which was not very fast but the projector had controls that allowed for single frame stepping back and forth so we could get enough very crude information to know if we were on the right track. The second tool we used, and this is a technique which is equally applicable now, is strobe lighting. It is especially useful for setting up liquid drip rigs. One the hardest drips to achieve is the “coronet” - the ring of multiple spikes each with a drop suspended above it. I was tremendously impressed to see that you had achieved this! It is one of the most difficult to set up. Usually it cannot be done in a conventional water bath but depends on the drip landing on a very, very thin film of liquid. The height and force of the falling drop is also incredibly critical as is the viscosity of the liquid. ‘Tuning’ all these to get exactly the circumstances needed for a good ‘coronet’ is not easy. I have done a quick mock up of how we did this below. 
A burette in a lab stand was set up above a water tank and the valve was adjusted to obtain a flow of about 2 - 4 drops a second. This was illuminated only by the strobe light as in the picture. Adjusting the speed of the strobe until it matched that of the drops would effectively ‘freeze’ the action to the eye. Drops would literally appear to float in mid air. This enabled you to see the shape of the splashes. What you were seeing was a flickering series of splashes one after another but it was sufficiently clear to be able to adjust the height of the burette and see the effect of different liquid depths, and viscosities before actually filming. The strobe is simply for setting up. Once we were confident we had everything optimum it would be turned off and we would start shooting with full strength continuous film lights. It is a crude and very simple technique but a very effective one and can be used for all types of drip analysis and set up. For the ‘coronet’ splash we would place a sheet of glass (set absolutely level) inside the water tank. We would start completely dry and let the drip run. As water slowly builds up on the face of the glass the ‘coronet’ starts to develop. It takes quite a few tries and adjustments to get exactly the right combinations but once set we could turn the drip off with just the right amount of liquid on the glass and start it dripping again once the camera was running. Because of the huge amounts of heat the lights would be switched on just a couple of seconds before the action. For the main lighting I usually used a hard low backlight combined with a soft back top light. Fill light for opaque liquids would be provided by white cards. Now I don’t know enough about how you set up your rig but I have a feeling the strobe would be as applicable for you now, as a means of arranging and pre-visualising set-ups, as it was for us then. You don’t need anything like disco strength - you can buy very cheap strobes of just a few watts on the web, which is all you need for viewing by eye. I am so, so impressed by your work. Have fun!  _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 02/04/18 00:21:23 AM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
Thanks David, that is really interesting, and makes me realise how much easier it is today, even on days like today, when I just couldn't get the timing/mixture etc right. Took about 250 exposures have attached the only half decent one, ( the blue). Time to go back to square one. I have also attached a couple I took after your advice on lighting. (the orange ones). Plus one from earlier in the week.  _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
Posted on 02/04/18 00:21:49 AM |
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vibeke
Kreative Kiwi Posts: 2152 Reply |
Re: How I'm wasting my time
 _________________ Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. |
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