Splash in a Glass
Glass 1
Being at home over Christmas once again gave the opportunity to do all the cool things with flash and macro photography which I can’t do in Jena. This time I was playing around with water drops again, but quickly realized that just taking pictures of water drops gets boring very quickly. Reason for this is that you have like 3 possible types of splash effects you can get, and once you catched them they all look the same.
So I started playing around with different setups, having a water drop fall into a glass for example. Problem there only was that the drops of course looked awesome as always, but the glass itself looked really bad with the lighting I had used so far (just flash from above). Now I had to find a different lighting setup which would create good light for the splash itself, the water in the glass and the glass plus some kind of background.
Glass 2
It took me about 4 hours of just testing out different things until I found the lighting setup which resulted in the final pictures. The key I found for getting a better lighting situation for the splash and the water was to not use the flash from above, but to rather have it directly from behind the glass. This has the advantage that the flash goes nearly completely into the glass and that any background which is there won’t just end up white.
But without any background the pictures didn’t turn out that great either, simply because without a background everything above the water is just too dark. So back to trying out different backgrounds in combination with an SB-800 right behind it (for the lighting from behind the glass). I ended up finding some small milk glass plates which turned out pretty well as background and basement for the glass. Only that the pieces where too small to fill the entire background, so for this I ended up using a of scattering foil which I had left from taking apart the LCD display of my old laptop 
Glass 3
The key in the final alignment of everything was to have the flash directly behind the background and on the same height of the glass. Everything was very close together, with only maybe 2 cm from flash to background and another 2cm from background to the glass. The SB-800 was on 1/4th or 1/8th power.
