Last Wednesday was an excellent practical evening at the Guild Photographic Society. George Franks came along and set up 4 tables with various setups to practice some high speed flash techniques.  George started with a brief introductory talk and then demonstrated each setup and helped the members take some high speed flash photos.  Two of the setups involved dropping objects into water with the water splashes appearing frozen, one had water dripping into a cocktail glass creating droplets (with images in the droplet) as well as it splashing into the glass and the fourth had wisps of smoke rising from a joystick.

The flash, mostly off-camera, with a remote trigger created the freezing effect. The initial settings were: camera on manual with a synch speed of 1/125, ISO 100-400, F8 and the flash set to 1/32 of power.  However, these settings would need to be experimented with to get the perfect shot.

Focusing was set initially by autofocus and then the focussing turned to manual. The object could then be dropped (always in the same vertical plane, knowing the focussing wouldn’t change).

A great fun evening of hands-on experience, with George giving us plenty of know-how and members coming away with knowledge about the technique and those who tried the technique on the night getting some good shots. So DO TRY THIS AT HOME.