Milk Drops

This sort of photography is very time consuming and very technical.
I used a Mac Book Pro to create he sound, active speakers one of which was removed from it's casing and then covered by a balloon. Three drops of milk were placed on the speaker surface, then the Mac was used to create the sound, a timing device was used to activate the flashes (4), camera was set to Bulb. A vibration sensor detected movement of the balloon and fired the flash.
The timing device was adjusted by 1 millisecond to get the right moment.
Here is a shot of my "studio".

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3339/3454449199_e26ed35418_b.jpg



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Please feel free to replace this with a fresh/resized image and remove this text :)
 
I think it's good. I'd be tempted to rotate slightly to make the bottom of the 'virtual disk' level, but it's certainly a neat trick. May have to try it myself, but without a trigger, it's more luck than judgement for me!
 
Wow thats really fantastic, it was nice to get to see all the stuff needed to get it to work thanks.
 
I've just taken a peek at the picture and while it is a very unusual and totally unexpected capture, seeing I'm in a rather lousy mood this morning I'm going to offer some criticisms. :eek: :cautious:
Yep, it's very rare for me to do that, but for a shot that took a LOT of setting up and a lot of hard work, I can't help thinking that it seems to be lacking something. As amazing as it does look, it seem to be missing that extra bit of oomph it so richly deserves.

So, what's on my mind regarding that picture then?

As someone else pointed out in here, it needs just a little bit of levelling off. That's the first thing I've noticed about the picture.
Then show a bit more of the surface as I felt that too much had been cropped off the bottom.
I could see something of a colour cast which had the effect of "draining" the colour out of the whole picture.
I also can't help thinking you may have overdone it on the general lighting and as a result the whole thing looks quite flat. I wouldn't mind seeing a bit of shadow to one side as I'm sure that would add more interest to what is an amazing concept.
Please don't think of me picking on you and taking this apart, it's a brilliant idea which you've pulled off but I couldn't give it 10 out of 10 all the time I've got these criticisms in my head.
Let's put it this way, If I wasn't too bothered about the picture then I wouldn't come up with this long-winded post I've just produced. :D
 
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Thats very impressive....Im really interested in this kind of thing. Can you give more info regarding what you used on the mac to fire the flash ? Did you write your own code to do that ??
 
Fabulous image. How many images do you take before you get a good one?

I think it would look even nicer with a little more space at the bottom and maybe a slight tinkering with the levels.
 
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