No recipe today again, I know I'm a slacker.. I did actually cook, but made a pie using some pastry that was made for me by my mother on the weekend, it's a "Secret recipe" although I know it now, so will reveal all when I attempt to recreate it :)

So, i've decided to talk about shooting water droplets and how I achieved the above photo.

 

This was actually a very simple setup, a pan of water, a desklamp, some card to reflect light, and some paper to create a kinda snoot for the on camera flash.

The setup looked like this: 

 
although that's not the lens that was in use at the time, I was using a Nikon Micro old manual focus thing that I got off ebay for about £80.  nice :)  it's a fantastic lens, and if you like the idea of macro photos a cheap ebay lens is a nice starting point.. and manual focus really doesn't cause you grief.
 
So, how was it done, apart from clicking the shutter and hoping for the best..  well, I also had a water dropper that I dropped continuous drops of water into a location that I had focussed the lens onto previously.  and then I wrote a program called Loligo Nikon Tether, which although it currently has the name Nikon in it, I recon it'll work with other cameras considering that I just wrote something that can talk to the camera via PTP (Photo transfer protocol).  so one of the options in this application is to trigger the camera, which is handy :) so I set the camera to fire every 5 seconds so that I could concentrate on dropping water in the correct location :)  much easier..  the Tether application also has the ability to transfer the pic back to the pc and show you a preview of the pic.  
 
The Desklamp was providing some light, and the flash was providing the rest via the snooted on camera flash (the paper wrapped up badly is a snoot heh) 
 
I put the camera on the fastest it would allow with the flash switched on, and let my program go :) 
 
So after taking roughly 500 photos, which happens pretty quick when taking one every 5 seconds lol.  I had a tinker around, found a few favourites and cleaned them up a little, then added a bit of a blue tint, cause I like blue :)
 
The program was written in .net 3.5  so if you want to have a play with it you'll need that runtime.
You also need to create a directory of C:\tethered_Out (for auto transferring)
you'll need to connect your camera via usb before starting the app. 
also if using Vista it seems to have a limitation of only supporting Jpg, so you'll have to set your camera to shoot raw and jpg if it's a nikon.  if your on xp you may be lucky enough for it to find the raws.  but i've only used this on Vista.
 
*Disclaimer* This is very much an alpha piece of software, use it at your own risk. it's not my fault if it somehow destroys your machine, camera or anything else related to you in any way lol.. 
 
 
Enjoy, and keep clicking heh.  it's all about practice, and knowing that out of hundreds of photos, you might get a few good uns :)