Strawberry Milk

I'm continuing to play around with high-speed shots and speedlites, and I did some more reading about really freezing motion. For day 91, I set up another shot, and did some more experimentation.

Today, I am going to post the picture first, and then explain what I did differently:



One of the things I have found hard about shots like this is that the max flash sync speed on most DSLRs is about 1/200th of a second. Basically you can't shoot any faster than that without getting a black or partially obliterated exposure due to the shutter being in the exposure when the flash fires. Since your average flash is only generating light for bursts as quickly as 1/8000th of a second, it's somewhat frustrating. You can use something called high-speed sync but you lose a lot of light doing so. It works, but it's imperfect.

Having done more reading, I wanted to try an alternate method of exposing high-speed, which is to use a long exposure on the shutter in a dark room, and remotely triggering the flash. This should, essentially, give you the equivalent of a very, very short exposure, and that is how this shot was taken.

Ideally, you would trigger your flash with something like a StopShot system, but I don't have one. In this case, the flash was fired by the test button and hand-timed. I can't complain, I managed this on the third or fourth try at which point I was tired of cleaning up milk splashes!

I think the effect works, and this is absolutely something I am going to continue to play. I also want to finish uploading my galleries on the business website, so far I have landscapes and portraits complete.

Time to start promoting the business soon!