So I finally finished the water drop system I had been working on for god-knows how many years. At last, it is all soldered up and inside a nice project box so I can grab it, plug it in, and take some shots at any time. Got these ones today. To be honest, I'm not 100% happy with them; had real trouble getting the lighting right and they came out quite washed-out so I had to do some work in Lightroom to get the colours to pop. Found out that using poster paint diluted seems to work better than food colouring in milk/xanthan gum. Enjoy the images and below are some shots of the setup.
This is the finished soldered up board, ESP8266 chip for wifi connectivity, two optocouplers to fire camera and flash, 12v switching transistor for the water dropper solenoid and a 12-5v buck converter to power the whole thing.
Project box with status LEDs and some vinyls that I printed on the wife's vinyl cutter.
Basic setup with the dropper over the tray, flash to the left with diffuser and one to light the backdrop. The dropper kit connects into the small transmitter which fires off the flashes.
The color variance from one drop is simply amazing/magical. that deep blue and honey gold is pretty nice, but I still do not see how you can get that range of color from a water drop.
So the water bath in that case is orange paint mixed with water. The drop that comes down is blue paint mixed with water. The blue drop goes into the water and due to it's surface tension holds together. The surface tension of the gold pulls the droplet back up and into the air (this is called a worthington jet). Then another blue water drop comes down and collides with the drop coming back up, causing the effect you see.
Still pretty amazing, and some pretty cool images.
!ENGAGE 25
ENGAGEtokens.