Tessa in the Studio (Patreon)

For something different we decided to shoot indoors in the studio using a water spray. I set up a cheap inflatable pol and covered it with a black cloth backdrop. I connected a garden hose to a water mixing valve for a comfortable water temperature and added a handheld lawn sprinkler for direction. It was a lot of fun.

I chose an aperture to allow for a bit of depth of field focus because I knew the water would play hell on the auto focus even though I use back button focus. This gave me a tiny margin of error and allowed for sharper water droplets. I set the shutter to fire the flash at the end of the exposure, rear curtain sync which insured any water trails would be moving in the correct direction. To stop the water droplets completely I used a couple of strobe heads, the main front through a focusing fresnel lens and the rear through a short throw reflector at the lowest power level or shortest flash duration.

85mm lens at f/4.0, ISO 100, 1/200th second shutter duration.

There was no ambient light recorded.