Rangefinder Magazine
September 2006

Lime Splash by Anton Heiberg
 

The idea for the lime splash photo was to create a photo of a slice of lime while it is dropping into water, showing the bubbles and movement streaks as it moves into the water, plus the splash above the water level. This is the sort of photo you’d see for beverage advertising.

For the lime splash photo I used a small rectangular fish tank (approx. 300mm long by 220mm wide by 220mm deep) made from clear sheet glass. The fish tank was set on a tabletop at a comfortable height. Before filling the fish tank three quarters full with clean water, I made sure that the tank was absolutely clean, with no fingerprint marks, dust, etc.

The main light source was a single Elinchrom Prolinca flash fitted with a small 600x600mm softbox. Since a slice of lime doesn’t move (twist and turn) in a predictable way once it is dropped into water, one has to select a fairly deep depth of field. Thus the softbox is placed right next to the fish tank to allow shooting at f/8. To avoid some of the nasty reflections, I turned the softbox slightly towards the camera, thus lighting the front glass of the fish tank from the back.

The side lighting has the effect of bringing out the texture of the fruit. A white sheet of polystyrene was used opposite the softbox on the other side of the fish tank to bounce back some of the light from the softbox. Since the background of the photo was to be black, one could use any color background as long as it is far enough away from the setup not to pick up any light from the softbox.

Two sheets of polystyrene that I’d painted black were used in front of the fish tank. The main reason for this was to eliminate my own reflection in the front glass of the fish tank. The sheets were close to the tank and the gap between them was just big enough to allow the lens to see the desired area in the tank. I used a 35–70mm Pentax lens on the Pentax *ist D, and the flash was triggered via a sync cord. The lens was fitted with a circular polarizer, which, in theory, would also help to minimize the glare and reflections from the tank. I chose a focus point in the water fairly close to the front glass and set the camera on manual focus. I set the camera to 1/125 at f/8. Although a 1/125 shutter speed is slow, the duration of the flash is much shorter (1/2000 approx.) and therefore it would freeze the action.

The lime was cut with a sharp utility knife into 3–5mm thick pieces. The lime piece was then dropped from various heights (±100mm–300mm) above the water level. The further the lime slice falls, the deeper it goes into the water and the greater the splash above the water line. Now this is where timing (and luck) comes in. With one hand I would drop the lime into the water, and with the other I would trigger the camera shutter, always keeping the shutter button halfway depressed while doing this.

After each shot I had to clean up any water splashes on the front glass of the fish tank, check (since I have a digital camera) the shot to determine if the timing was correct for the height, and check the field of view to see if both the dropping lime and the splash are part of the frame.

After a couple of lime drops, consider cleaning the fish tank again and using fresh water since the lime tends to make the water a bit murky. Do this a couple of hundred times, and with a lot of perseverance and a bit of luck, you might just get one award-winning photo. To get one good photo in 100 is more or less what you can expect.

For retouching I did the following in Photoshop: Levels were adjusted by selecting a black point in the photo. I cloned out some of the untidy bits in the water, and before saving I used the Unsharp mask with the following settings: Amount: 300%; Radius: 1.7 – 3 pixels, Threshold: 0 levels.

Anton Heiberg is a photographer from Middelburg, Mpumalanga, South Africa. He and his wife specialize in wedding photography, and he does some other freelance work, including writing informative articles for photography magazines. More of his work can be seen on www.angelfire. com/art/heiberg.