Splash photography — How to photograph liquid splashes

8 min readJul 15, 2019

Splash photography is exciting, fast-paced, messy and creative — what’s not to love?

If you’ve never tried splash photography before or if you’re looking for a few useful tips or new ideas, then this is the place to be. I explain the equipment, lighting, important photographic concepts and also share a few creative ideas for you to try.

Splash photography is a technique that can add a certain degree of professionalism to your portfolio. Yes it requires some patience and practice, but the most basic of splash shots can be achieved with little more than your camera, a speedlite and some diffusion material. However, you can also go much, much further with it. You can find a number of splash photography tutorials on our site, including our recent Clinique product shoot, but I’ve put together the most important techniques and tips here to get you started.

Splash photography kit

Whether you’re photographing a simple splash shot or something more advanced, the equipment you’ll need is roughly the same.

Essential equipment:

Tripod
Light — Speedlite or studio lights
Diffusion material — Diffusion roll or acrylic
Protective plastic for your camera
Micro-fibre cloths or paper towels

Extra equipment

Trigger device — Infrared or sound trigger

Tripod
I wouldn’t recommend shooting splash photography hand held, not unless you want the added difficulty of movement, so a good tripod is essential. Having your camera in a fixed position means you can set everything up, pre-focus and just shoot. If you don’t have an assistant, you’ll need both hands — one for creating your splash and one for pressing the shutter.

Light
Fast flash duration is the most important thing when it comes to your lighting (I discuss this more later in this article). If you don’t have studio lights with fast flash duration, speedlites can work (I used speedlites for a lot of my early splash photography with paint). However, they do need to be used at lower powers to get a fast flash duration. At 1/2 or 1/4 power you can get approximately 1/6000 flash duration. But using them at low power does mean you may need to cluster a few together to get sufficient light.

Diffusion material
Diffusion material, whether it be diffusion paper or a piece of acrylic, is useful to have on hand for a few reasons. Both can be used either as a background for your shot or to diffuse the light.

Protective plastic for your camera
Splash photography can get messy so it’s worth protecting your camera (especially if you’re shooting paint!). I often use clear polythene sheeting which, although thin, does a great job of protecting against the odd splash of water. Depending on how crazy your shoot is, this can also be used for covering any exposed electrical points or lights.

Micro-fibre cloths or paper towels
Things can get messy! I often keep these on hand when photographing liquids, as you’ll see in many of our tutorials involving liquids. They can be used for wiping down surfaces or cleaning glass, if you’re shooting in a tank. A squeegee is another useful piece of kit to quickly remove water droplets from glass.

How to capture a splash photo

Once you’ve decided on the setup for your shot, have everything in position and have covered your camera and any electric cables, you’re ready to start shooting. But for any one who has tried splash photography before, you know that the process takes time and it requires patience as well as a little bit of luck.

However, there are a few techniques you can use that will improve your chances of getting a good shot. These include using a fast flash duration and mirror lock up mode, choosing the right camera settings and pre-focusing.

Fast flash duration

One of the key things for capturing high-speed, fast-flying liquids is fast flash duration. A common mistake that people make when photographing splash shots is focusing too much on what shutter speed they use. In actual fact, it is the speed and duration of the flash that freezes motion, not shutter speed. Flash duration is the length of time of the burst of light emitted from a studio light (or speedlite). This can vary depending on the type of light and even from brand to brand.

Diagram explaining t 0.5 and t 0.1 flash duration.

So why is flash duration more important? Well, quite simply, it isn’t actually your shutter speed that freezes the motion — it’s the flash.

When it comes to photographing high-speed objects often the shutter speed alone isn’t enough to completely freeze motion. It therefore becomes necessary to use flash, and the faster the flash duration the better.

Flash duration is measured in two ways: t 0.5 and t 0.1. The former is the one most commonly displayed by manufacturers as it generally sounds more impressive. However, t0.5 does not measure all the light relevant for complete shooting — approximately 40 per cent of the flash burst is unaccounted for in these readings. Because of this, t 0.5 measurements give a much faster, but false impression of the flash reading. T 0.1 readings, on the other hand, account for the entire flash burst. This gives a slower reading but is much more accurate.

As an example, if a flash has a t 0.1 reading of 1/5000 then this would be very fast and would be equivalent to 1/15000 t 0.5).

To learn more about flash duration and t 0.1 and t 0.5 measurements, visit our Lighting Theory & Equipment section, where you’ll find a class dedicated to this particular section: ‘Understanding flash duration’.

Shutter speed vs flash duration.

Mirror Lock-Up mode

Many of you may be familiar with using the Mirror Lock-Up feature on DSLR cameras to increase sharpness during long exposures. But this feature can also be used to reduce delay time when taking a photo. This is a useful technique when photographing splash shots, especially if you’re not using any sort of trigger.

Mirror Lock-Up flips the mirror up before the shutter opens, which means when you press the shutter, you immediately capture the photo. However, enabling Mirror Lock-Up means, because the mirror is already up, you are unable to see anything through the viewfinder (when looking through the viewfinder, what you see is a reflection of what the mirror is seeing through the lens). This is another reason why having your camera on a tripod for splash photography is a good idea and why you should pre-focus if you can.

Mirror lock-up mode.

Camera settings

As with any genre of photography, there are no universal camera settings that will result in a great photo. However, there are a few key points that you should keep in mind when choosing your camera settings.

I touched on shutter speed earlier, so you already know that it isn’t the shutter speed that freezes the movement. However, that doesn’t mean you should be shooting at 1/10. Ideally you want the highest sync speed your camera will allow (medium format cameras can sync at any speed but for 35mm cameras, this is generally around 1/200).

What is important though is that your shutter speed is fast enough to cut out any ambient light, such as natural light. To do this, take a shot without the flash. The result should be a black image. If you see any light in the photo, you’ll need to increase your shutter speed or turn off the modeling lights (along with any other additional ambient lighting).

For your aperture I’d recommend shooting around f11 to f16 (this is what I usually shoot at on medium format) — you want sufficient depth of field that the entirety your water splash will be in focus.

The ISO should be fairly low, I try to keep mine at 100 wherever I can. However, as you’re shooting at lower flash powers, you may need to increase this. You’ll have to judge this as you shoot.

Where to focus

Where to focus in an image is a question that I get a lot. For splash photography, I usually pre-focus either above the glass (if I’m dropping things into liquids) or where I expect the splash to be (I do this by placing a lighting stand temporarily or getting my assistant to hold their hand roughly in position). Pre-focusing your shot is crucial for splash photography if you’re using Mirror Lock-Up (as I explained earlier).

Splash photography ideas

If you’re looking for splash photography ideas, take a look at work by liquid specialists such as Barry Makariou and David Lund (both of whom were guests on our live talk show). Jonathan Knowles, who will be joining us for a live talk showlater this year, also produces some great work, and you can also look at further examples of my own work on my portfolio. Look online, find images that you like and try put your own creative spin on them. I’ve also included a few videos for shots that I’ve done to help you with ideas.

Easy splash shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HkAIPTRdaQ

One light speedlite splash shot

Smashing glasses splash shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTUz4glq89Y

Smashing whisky glasses using fast flash duration studio lights

There is also a number of classes available on Karl Taylor Education, where I show you exactly how to photograph splashes. You can find these throughout our Product section, as well as in our Live Show replays.

Remember, you can get as creative as you like with splash photography — flying wine glasses, elegant water splashes, even models throwing paint. The sky is your limit!