Dripping…

Dripping water is a nuisance. Certainly if you want to sleep. It’s even more a nuisance when that water is dripping inside your kitchen cabinets, making sure you will never use that flour again.

Plup

Nor the sugar and the salt you had stored for later. Obviously you should have looked before it came to that, right? After that you may have some other ideas as to what to do with dripping water. Come on in and see.

In the ‘80s, I had a favourite rock/electronic group called Tangerine Dream. Crazy enough, these guys still play original and new music today. However, they had one of their album covers that intrigued me. It was a drop of milk, rising from a plate.

Working in the darkroom, I tried to get the same type of picture, with mixed results. Mostly no results. It’s quite difficult to “catch” that drop at the right moment. A great deal of trial and error comes into play.

Plip

I managed to get one good picture at the time and sold it as a B&W poster a few times. That was the extent of my glory as a photographer.

The dripping water in our kitchen cabinets brought me back to the idea and I tried it again. This time with a digital camera, so missing a few shots is not so expensive Winking smile.

Drip

To reassure you, this is clean water dripping, not the murky brown stuff that is currently flooding my kitchen cabinets. I hope the plumbers will come soon and find that hole. As I have told before, my building is a heritage building.

Plup

The building is more than a hundred years old and cost less than one hundred thousand dollars to build. That is based on the most expensive one a few blocks away. That one cost 110,000 $, so just calculating a bit.

Plip

Living in a heritage building can have its nice sides too. You live in a building that has character. Not the standard measurements, windows that can get stuck or that don’t close, it’s all part of the charm.

Flash!

But there are also the hardwood floors, the heating on steam, nice and warm. There is much to say for old buildings, from both sides.

The pictures here are made with simple materials. I ate the yoghurt that was left in a one litre plastic recipient, the one that you can buy in any store.

Plip

I made a small hole in the bottom of the (cleaned) yoghurt can with a needle, The hole was barely half a millimeter. I then filled it with water and put it in the kitchen cabinets that “overlook” the counter top.

On the counter top, I placed a plate, a deep one, like the ones you use for soup. Filled it with water and focussed on the impact point using a pencil.

Splash

Once focussed, I switched the camera to manual to avoid re-focussing. The drops are going to fall in the same spot, every time anyway. In the above shot you can see the flower motive of the plate.

For the rest of the shots I used a glass bowl, a little deeper and colorless.

Plop

The shots are lit with my SB600 in slave mode, no light coming directly from the camera. Using the flash in TTL mode didn’t give such wonderful results, so I switched it to manual at 1/8th power. Some pictures were shot with a blue gel, a small set I just got from an online camera store.

The background was a simple piece of black thick paper, bought in a dollar store not far away.

Plip

And that’s the whole setup. Nothing much, as long as the camera is on a tripod and the speedlight far enough away from splashing water.

Now let’s hope that these plumbers come quickly and fix that leak, wherever it is. At least before the dripping water starts looking like this:

Splash

But by then they would know where the leak is, I guess…

Until next time, in a drier mood…