In this post I’ll briefly explain how to take photographs like this one.

Just like my previous post on shooting sprinklers, this isn’t exactly the most practical of tutorials. Sorry.

All you need is a small point and shoot camera with an attached wrist-strap. For the examples in this post, I used a Sony DSC-P200:

You’ll need to be able to control the shutter speed of the camera. Most point-and-shoots should have some way for you to do this. Take a look at your instruction manual if you’re not sure how to. For my point-and-shoot, I can control the shutter speed by shooting in manual mode:

Choose how long you want the shutter to stay open for. I set shutter speed at 30 seconds for the examples in this post, which is the maximum the camera allows.

Once you’ve chosen your shutter speed, find a dark place (you’ll probably want to do this at night), press the shutter, hold the camera by the strap, and start swinging your camera around like a madman. Make sure your strap is sturdy so that your camera won’t accidentally fly off of it.

Afterwards, you might have overexposed your image if you kept the shutter open too long with too much light.

A little Photoshopping can help you get the look you want:

Things to experiment with for interesting results:

• Location
• Shutter speed
• Color of the lights around you
• How you swing the camera

Good luck!

This is another post geared towards ideas and experimentation, rather than practicality and general photography.

Here are two (kind of abstract) photographs I took recently. The first one is of some webs that I came across:

Canon 40D + 16-35mm f/2.8 at 35mm. f/10, 1/50s, and ISO 200.

The second photo was of the night sky packed with stars:

Canon 40D + 16-35mm f/2.8 at 26mm. f/2.8, 1/800s, and ISO 200.

Actually, neither of the photos were of what I claimed they were.

Can you guess what I shot to make these two photographs?

They were actually both taken in my backyard. My sprinklers were going off and I was curious about what the scene would look like photographed.

In fact, both photos are nearly identical in location and framing. What was different was shutter speed. Notice how the water drops in the first photograph appear as lines. The relatively slow shutter speed (1/50th of a second) is what did that. The faster shutter speed (1/800ths of a second) in the second one rendered the drops almost as points.

Here are the original, uncropped photos. You can hover your mouse over them to see what they looked like straight out of the camera, prior to post-processing:

For photos like these, the sprinklers should be between you and the sun. If the sun is behind you, then you probably won’t catch the water drops very well on camera. It also helps around if there’s a shadow or dark background behind the sprinklers.

Try experimenting with abstract photographs of ordinary things, using camera settings to give the photos different looks and textures. If you come up with some interesting ideas or find interesting results on your hands, please do share them with us!

Here’s a quick idea for you to try if you’re looking for some photo inspiration (after all, we have a whole section devoted to this kind of thing). I haven’t spent much time hashing out this idea, so it’s pretty undeveloped compared to some of the other walkthroughs I’ve written. Maybe one of these days I’ll go out with my assistant (AKA my brother) and really shoot this concept.

What You’ll Need

In addition to your camera, this will require:

• A nice outdoor location
• A garden hose
• Something that can generate mist (i.e. garden hose spray gun)
• An assistant

What To Do

Be sure it’s a pretty sunny day outside. Rainbows might be hard to catch if there’s too little direct sunlight (kind of the opposite of fish?).

You’ll want to stand somewhere between the sun and the mist. Otherwise, you’ll end up with photos that look like these:

Even though they might be interesting, you won’t end up with any rainbows shooting out of the spray gun.

Have your assistant spray mist in your general direction, and try to move around to see if you can catch a glimpse of any rainbow that may result. If you locate this rainbow, reposition your assistant’s spray and your own location until the rainbow matches up with the spray nozzle in your assistant’s hand.

I haven’t experimented much with the location or background, but try to keep the background dark to have the rainbow stand out more in the photo. Also, try shooting wide open (largest aperture) if possible, to throw the background out of focus and further bring out the rainbow.

That’s about it! If any of you try your hand at this idea and have interesting results, please do share it with us by linking to your photograph in the comments!

Felt like experimenting a little today, and started out shooting low depth of field photographs of flying insects. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was taking photographs of water balloons popping (Don’t ask me how). Here’s what I used:

• String – To hang the water balloon from
• Binder clip – To fasten the water balloon to the string
• Canon 40D – You just need a camera where you can control shutter speed. 6.5 frames per second doesn’t hurt either.
• Tripod – To free up my hands
• Remote shutter release – So I could stand away from the camera
• Water balloons

A flash may or may not be necessary depending on your lighting conditions. Since I was outdoors during the day (didn’t want to pop water balloons indoors), I ended up not needing the flash that I brought along.

Now, I also needed something to pop the balloons with. Using a knife or a needle might work, but I chose to use a pneumatic air rifle so I could pop the balloons from behind my camera.

I shot in manual mode, since I didn’t want exposure to vary from picture to picture.

I set aperture to somewhere between f/4.5 and f/5.6 for enough depth of field to keep much of the water sphere sharp, while blurring the background enough to have it not be distracting. For shutter speed, I tried to stay above 1/2000 of a second to freeze the water, though I sometimes had to drop down to around 1/1000 to expose correctly when clouds passed overhead. This produced a little more motion blur, as you’ll see in a bit. To properly expose at these settings without using the flash, I had to push my ISO up to 800 or 1600. I also set my lens to manual focus and my drive mode to high-speed continuous shooting (6.5 fps).

Now after adjusting everything properly (i.e. making sure exposure and focus were correct), I picked up the remote with my left hand, and the air gun with my right. As I continuously snapped photos at 6.5 shots per second with my left hand, I aimed at the balloon and pulled the trigger with my right.

Aside from this basic technique, everything else was left to chance. At least one or two frames from each attempt was decent, and using a binder clip saved me time by allowing me to just clip the balloon up each time rather than tie it.

Here are some of the photos I ended up with:

There you have it. Photographs of water balloons popping. As a side note, you can also do some other pretty interesting stuff with the same setup (though this photo would have been a lot neater if it was a little boy or girl blowing):

I had another go at the Bible Heart picture but this time with a tripod to properly hold the flash so that I could get consistent lighting and a ring instead of a UV filter.

This was my intial set up. I changed it a little bit later on but this is basically what it looked like.

I used all manual settings to see where the shadow was going at first, and ended up using some really weird settings. I was at f/20 for aperture (which I never do) and you can see that basically everything is in focus. Haha.

Ahh… Finally got the heart as I wanted it to look! The first picture is what the shadow looks like from above (obviously distorted); it’s that way because John 3:16 is more to the end of the Bible and the page heights are different. Then I had to play around with what angle to shoot from to get rid of the distortion. After I figured that out…it was time to change some settings and ring placement. I then reverted to f/2.8 so that I could pick and choose what was in focus.

Here’s an intial shot I took with the ring in focus. It doesn’t have much meaning to it though:

Here’s one of the final pictures. I made the ring out of focus on purpose and then focused on the word “loved.”

Then I really wanted a picture from that top view perspective so then I turned to the middle of the Bible and took another couple of pics.

Here’s the one I chose for the final for that:

This blog post was originally published here.