Posts Tagged ‘sweet’

Watering a Water Melon

water melon, originally uploaded by Art By Steve Johnson.

Here is something a bit different – cubes of water melon being squirted with water – not as technically difficult as it looks. There was a reasonable level of ambient light so I just set the shutter speed to maximum flash sync, manually focused to a point just in front of where I intended to squirt, set the self timer and started squirting.

There are, in effect three light sources at work, flash on the left as you look at the picture, a lot of ambient from behind and a little from the right.

If you look at the feint trails with the  on the left of the image as you look at you can see that the water drops appear a little in from the right. The trails are the highlights on the drops and the brightness of the trail shows when the flash went off in relation to the entire release time. The rest of the trail is the non flash shutter open time and more interestingly, gives an idea of the ambient light level.

Having a plastic working surface is really handy (this is a gray plastic fold out decorating table. The amount of water is deceptive – there is actually very little, about a teaspoonful in the whole shot and about a tablespoonful including what is out of frame so no studio flood to mop up.