Here is a simple DIY project, a DIY water drop apparatus to get photos of splashes. I devised it for a workshop I gave to our camera club and decided to document what I did. Of course you could buy commercial products that are much more versatile (eg Pluto Trigger or MIOPS trigger), but they will set you back several hundreds-of-dollars, rather than this DIY approach that will cost you at most several dollars.
This is not a blueprint on how YOU should make it. I made the rig with bits and pieces I had at home. The general idea should point you in the right direction for you to recycle bits and pieces you have, or beg/borrow/buy cheap bits to complete it.
The base board was a piece of plywood – a piece of an old shelf. The column was a bit of alloy tubing from an old clothes airing rack that I dismantled. You can buy similar aluminium tubing or wooden dowel at hardware stores for a few dollars. I connected this to the base board with a block of wood with a hole drilled to hold the column, and screwed to the baseboard from below.
To hold the side arm I drilled holes in a cube of wood at right angles. I used a bulldog clip to stop the block sliding down the column. This allows easy adjustment of the height for the drop. You can use the same sort of tubing for the side arm as the column; you can adjust how far the side arm projects by sliding it within the block. If it rotates when you load the water you can fix it with sticky tape, or put in a screw through the wood block to fix it in place.
I used a 20 mL syringe (I happened to have some at hand, but you can probably get them at a pharmacy), and used rubber bands to hold it against the side arm. From the nozzle (Luer slip tip) I put a small bit of flexible garden dripper tube to connect it to a small inline dripper tap, so I could control the flow. You might be able to avoid the syringe and flexible tubing if you use a small disposable water bottle. You might be able to punch a small hole in the cap to allow you to screw the dripper tap in. Cut off the bottom of the bottle, screw on the bottle top with tap, invert and see if it works. You may need to use sealant to avoid leaks between the tap and the bottle cap. Or even just make a pin hole in the cap and see if you get nice drip rates (small holes give slow drips; start small and work up until you have the drip rate you want. Another alternative is to use a siphon to deliver water to the dripper tap.
Another suggestion is that aquarium shops sell small adjustable valves (taps) for aquarium air-lines, so you could probably use one of those instead of a drip-irrigation tap.
Use a drip tray (there will be lots of splashes). Place a bowl on the drip tray under the dripper, and fill it with water. In the illustration I have used a white takeaway bowl, but feel free to experiment with coloured bowls or clear glass bowls. Place a background (far enough back to avoid splashes unless you are using, say, coloured fabric that won’t mind getting wet).
Now you are ready to play. Let’s discuss camera settings.
Since the drops are very dynamic you will need a very short exposure time. The best way is probably to use flash. On my Canon 580EX at 1/8 power the flash duration is about 1/4000 which is enough to freeze the motion of the water droplets and splashes. Set the camera to flash sync speed (eg 1/250 sec, depending on your camera). There will be some movement of the point at which the water drop lands (depending on random movements as the drop forms, air movements, distance from dripper to bowl etc), so I use f16. Set ISO 200 as a starting point, and flash on manual at, say, 1/8 power. Adjust the flash power and ISO as needed to get optimum exposure.
If you are not using flash you will need powerful continuous lighting to enable fast shutter speed (say 1/2000 sec as a starting point, but experiment) which will probably necessitate higher ISO settings. Adjust your settings to get appropriate exposure. With continuous lighting you will be able to use High Speed “motor drive” to get a sequence of shots, which may allow you to use slower drip speeds and still give you usable splashes in each burst of shots.
To avoid unwanted camera movements use a tripod. Focus on where the drops will land. If you are using a mirrorless camera you may need to change the viewfinder settings. Often it is set to display the image as it would be captured on the sensor, which is fine for ambient light, but if you are using flash, you may find the viewfinder is very dark since the main light (flash) is not illuminating the subject. You will find somewhere in the menu there is a setting to emulate an optical view finder so you see the subject in reasonable exposure. On my OM1 the menu is shown below, but the menu set-up, and exact terminology may vary depending on your camera brand and model.
Once you can see the subject, use manual focus to get the area where the drips land in focus. Now you can start to get photos. It is hit and miss. Remember to wait for the flash to charge before releasing the shutter or you will get blank images. Adjust the drip rate with the tap. If the drips are too infrequent you may get many “misses”. If your drip rate is too high it may get messy with multiple splashes in exposures (but that may also give interesting effects). Below are thumbnails of some of my better images (about 1 in 10 of the exposures I took (and a biscuit I chomped on between sequences).
If your flash has a “strobe” function that operates fast enough (multiple sequential flashes in a single exposure), you might try that to see what effects you get (may need to use a longer exposure time). Try adjusting the height the drips come from to see how things change. Play with different backgrounds; perhaps use a different coloured/patterned bowl. Maybe colour the water with food dye. Maybe colour the drip water but not the bowl. Maybe drip into milk … Experiment.
Hope it all works for you. Let me know if you have problems.