Drops meet color by Tobias Bräuning

5 questions about this photo:

Q1. What equipment did you use?
- Canon 40D
- 2 Flashes
- Arduino microcontroller
- 3 solenoid valves
- Some selfmade circuits
- PC with a selfmade GUI to control all parameters on the microcontroller for generating the drops, timing of shutter release and triggering the flashes
- A lot of cables :-)
- Some ink for the colors

Q2. What settings did you have on your camera?
The camera was set to manual mode, shutter 0.6 sec, F/16, ISO200. Camera, flashes and valves are controlled by microcontroller.


Q3. What software did you use during the post-production?
I used Canon Digital Photo Professional for the RAW conversion, then I did some clean-up + contrast settings in Photoshop Elements 8.

Q4. What is the subject of the photo?
What we can see in this photo is the result of a collision of 3 waterdrops. The first one falls down into the water, then splashes up again. When it's rising up, the second drop falls down and collides with the upcoming first one. Some milliseconds later, the third drop comes down and collides with the result of the first drop collision... So finally this results in very exciting, various forms.

Q5. How did you come up with the idea of this shot?
I saw some images of such drop collisions with 3 drops, but my valve was too slow to make it possible with only one valve. So I decided to try it with 3 valves (let me say - it is not easy to get 3 drops to one flight path!), and with the 3-valve-solution it got also possible to use different colored drops, something I've never seen before in this combination. So I had the motivation to make it work. :-)