Strawberries and Milk

Heyy! 

This is a "How-to" for High Speed photography

Before I begin to explain how me and my boyfriend created these shoots I want to just say, I know that this has been done loads of times before, however, I feel that I should explain our technique.

Now the whole shot was done within about an hour, including setup and take down time, so it doesn’t take a great deal of time. All you’ll need is:

·         Some black paper (We got a roll from Staples for about £5, and it was more than enough).

·         A tripod.

·         A telephoto lens (So the camera is far away from the milk splashes), we used the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM

·         A bowl and plate, I’ll explain why both later.

·         Milk (We added some water so it’ll flow better and so we’d use less milk).

·         Strawberries (Or another fruit).

·         An assistant is very useful.

·         And of course, a camera is normally a good idea too – we used a 500D.

We shoot the whole thing outside, taking advantage of the light that we had already, and it also let us get shutter speeds of around 1/700, to really freeze the action. To start with, you want to set up the black paper from a high point, and then run it down to the floor, and then along the front, you probably don’t need as much as we used, just enough to cover up the background of where you will be taking the photo is good enough. Then grab a plate and bowl and place it in the middle of the paper.

We used the bowl to catch the strawberry and for the milk to splash from, and the plate to catch the milk – so we could re-use it and to also make less of a mess.

Once you’ve got that setup, you want to fill the bowl to the top with a milk/water combination, we kept a jug of it just to the side so we could refill the bowl if the milk missed the plate and splashed the black paper – which of course it did.

Now the subject area is complete, we want to look at the camera end, just set up the camera on a tripod with the telephoto lens, and zoom right in to the bowl, and using manual focus, set the focus to an object in the middle of the bowl, a finger from your assistant, or a pencil being balanced across the top of the bowl. Now for the settings, obviously you should play about with them, but we normally used a shutter speed of about 1/700, ISO 1600 and a F-Stop of about 7.1 – we decided to use this so that the whole splash would be in focus, the earlier shoots we did – the splashes were out of focus at the front and back, and we just didn’t like it, this does however make cleaning the background much harder. Also – MAKE SURE YOU SHOOT IN RAW.

Now its time for the fun to start. You’ve got everything setup, the bowl, the background and the camera. You want to get an assistant to hold a strawberry about a foot above the bowl, but vary this to create a bigger or smaller splash, if you don’t have an assistant, then you’ll either need a remote shutter, or use the self timer. Now count, 3, 2, 1, and then the assistant will drop the strawberry. Now we found it best to press the shutter as soon as you hear the splash, rather than trying to guess the time it will take for the strawberry to fall. Just take the picture as you hear the splash, to create the wall. If you can get it just before then, then you’ll get the milk splashing over the edge and the wall of milk starting to form.

After about 10 strawberries (They eventually destroy themselves on impact, or you just can’t resist eating them) you’ll hopefully have a range of images. We took about 50 images in total, with about 8 really good ones – but I think that most of them were just trying to find the best technique.

Now just a quick warning – it gets very messy. No really, the picture below shows the mess at about half way through. One real stupid mistake we made was not cut off the main part of the black roll before starting, and at one point we had a lot of milk moving its way to the full roll. Also, we had one nice shot ruined by a bit of rouge strawberry, make sure you remove any small bits of strawberry between each shot.

Right – so you’ve got a few good shots – what’s next? Well you want to open up Photoshop (Apply what I write here, to whatever program you use) and just play about with the RAW files and try to hide as much of the milk on the background as possible, when you’ve got rid of as much as you can, then you will have to use various tools to remove the rest – and to make little touch up’s. Clone stamp is probably your best bet here.

Now photography is all about experimenting – I’ve written a basic guide (though pretty lengthy) about how to setup from start to finish – but it’s by most defiantly not a pick up and apply yourself. There are things you will need to change for yourself, how close you zoom into the bowl (If anything, I would say I was too close throughout the shoot), maybe what fruit you drop, if you water the milk etc. There are hundreds of things you could change about my guide.

Please post any photos you take with my method, I’d love to see the results. I’m planning on taking what I’ve learnt this time round, and redo the shoot, with other fruits/different liquids. I'll put the photos in another post, nice things to look at tomorrow!

Thanks for reading,
Elle Beere and Tyler Frankling xxxxx