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Miranda got given a camera for her birthday and has been learning some things from me. After reading this post about photographing with your child we went and did a photo shoot with Laurel Pearce. Today I decided to do water drop splash photography after reading this instruction article.

I set my room up as in the photo below. The two light stands supported a dowel (though these could be anything) from which I hung a bottle with string. I pierced a small hole in it and then twisted the cap to allow water to flow in short drops. I placed a low bucket on the table (on a towel) and an ice-cream container upside down in the bucket. On top of that I placed a black dessert bowl filled with water. The red bucket under the table is supporting a flash aimed at the whiteboard balanced on the chair. For the white background shots i ran this flash at half power. For the coloured shots i draped material, towels, blankets and a green shopping bag over the whiteboard and used full power. For the lighter colours I moved the chair away from the camera as more light was being reflected. The second off camera flash is on the green box to the right of the bowls. I also tried this on the left for the last few shots I took. This flash was on a low power setting with the diffuser over the flash. The camera was attached to the lens mounted on the tripod. IT is a Canon EOS 50D and the lens i was using is a Canon 70-200 IS USM 2.8 L Lens. I had ISO 125, Shutter 1/250 and the aperture varied from 3.5 for a couple of shots through to 16 to 20. Most shots were on 16 or 20. The different colours reflected light differently and I need better exposure on those shots – hence the experimentation with the aperture settings. I was zoomed right in at 200mm and the camera was as close to the subject as possible for focus. I turned off AF focus and using the manual focus focused on a piece of wood placed over the bowl right under the drips. I experimented with the height of the camera on the tripod also to get more or less of the water surface.

For the last few coloured shots I put some milk in the bowl (changed to a white bowl with a blue inside surface) and some milk in the bottle. Not pure – just mixed it in with the water. I was particularly please with the reflection of the background coloured light on the  milk along with the blue from the bowl interior.

All the good shots are up at Flickr in the Studio Shoots – Stills Set.

A selection are below.

Life has been going by too fast to write about it. Sorry about that – but sometimes it happens.

Here's a quick summary of the last few weeks.

• Major software development project that the Jethro team has been working on coming to the point where it is to be installed at the clients for testing. Now in testing, bug fixing and finalisation stages. This has been a massive project and taken almost every weekend for the last 2 months.
• Another software development job coming to completion this week.
• Firming up new contracts with clients so as to ensure a steady income stream for potential new full time staff.
• Finalising the hand over to Gordon of the Web Services Management. He now handles most of this on his own.
• Installation of two new servers and decommission of three old ones. Migrating all the users, setting up remote access for all our staff and troubleshooting the inevitable problems.
• Basketball coaching – preparing for a competition in September.
• Football – have had to skip due to some niggly injuries and inability to play.
• Photography – Nelson Lai came to me to take me through a professional shooting tutorial, followed by a real live model shoot and then post shoot editing techniques in Photoshop. Wow what an amazing day. I have started editing photos and will slowly display them as I get them done. There are already some up on facebook for those who connect to me there, and the public  flickr and redbubble accounts get the better quality versions.
• Family – with so much work on I have prioritised family time over other activities (including blogging). Hence why I have not gone to football training and skipped a game I would dearly have loved to play in. We went to see Ice Age 3 the other day and have also gone to game zone, gone to the bike riding park and spent a lot of time watching Masterchef together.

From the bike park

Now there’s two of us!

Having worked for 72 hours last week and most of the weekend so far, it was good to take a couple of breaks. Saturday I went for a bike ride with the youth through the bush near here. After losing the slow riders early on the fast bunch went hard for an hour or so. I followed that up with hanging with our kids for a bit. We had some great laughs just hanging out. Today I went to church briefly (after a few hours sleep – didn’t stop to talk sorry) and came back home to work. At 4 PM I had finished a major piece of work and decided to take the kids to the park. We went to the lake and I have that story below. I actually ended up being there for 2.5 hours and took over 400 photos while I was there. All the good ones have been uploaded into Flickr in a couple of different sets. All the photos I uploaded are in the 20081130 lakewalk set. I also uploaded large versions of the close ups, mostly of birds, but also of the girls, into the Close Ups set. There are some really nice black and white shots of the girls there.

After playing in the playground for starters, we went exploring – Mercedes was the leader today. First we went out onto the bridge over the lake and looked at ducks, turtles, fish, dragonflies and lilies. I have been teaching them the value of sitting still and looking at what you can see sometimes. It is amazing what is right under your feet!