The Life Cycle of a Water Droplet

I had a shot a capturing a water droplet using 4K video burst on my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ330 camera earlier this week and warned you that I would probably try some more shots in a better environment. So I set up my water droplet gear outside on moderately bright afternoon. My gear is not special just a fish tank water valve connected too some plastic hosing and fed from a jug of water higher than the valve. The valve is kept in place by a retort stand with a boss head and clamp over a oven dish which has been painted matt black. The reflected colours in the water are from an A4 print of a graduated spectrum from photoshop.

I shot several sequences trying different ISO speeds and a couple of wide apertures. The results are not quite as crisp as using a flash set up and the speed of the initial drop falling was too fast for my 1/1600 of a second shutter speed so you have a slightly blurred shot which appears more oval than round but I think the rest of the sequence is reasonably good. With the flash set up it would be impossible to get a sequence of eight shots so you could not literally show the life cycle of a particular water droplet as I have done here. The burst speed is about 1/30th of a second and these are consecutive shots covering about a quarter of a second.

Sorry for the techy talk but I know there are other water droplets blippers out there who might be interested.

PS. To follow the lifecycle - start at the left hand top corner and view is a clockwise direction