This was before someone made an automated dropper that could just do it for you.
I saw a poster as a kid with a water drop hitting another water drop in mid-air. That image stuck with me over the years. One day, as a photographer, it got to me, and I decided to attempt it. My first try was just catching a single water drop from a cup in my sink. That was easy—I got it within a couple of tries.
The calamity that followed was straight out of a horror story.
Let’s begin with the setup. Everything I thought I knew about flash in my early days had to be thrown out the window. Because of how high-speed sync works and how flash durations affect exposure, I didn’t realize that lower flash power actually meant faster flash times. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to set my flash to 1/64th power instead of 1/2 power to get the photo I needed. But after I finally figured that out, I started setting things up.
The backdrop was easy—just black cardboard seamless paper from Hobby Lobby. But then came the container issue. Small glasses didn’t work because they were visible in the photo, and the water drop needed something to rebound off of. It couldn’t just hit a shallow surface and get a good splash coming back up—it had to be deep, like a bowl. Once I figured that out, the next challenge was how to make a dripper.
That part seemed easy at first—a simple hose with an adjuster to slow the drip down enough for me to time it. But then came the second challenge: getting another dropper perfectly in sync with the first one so that two drops would come out at nearly the same time. The goal was for the first drop to hit the water and bounce back just in time to be hit by the second drop. This was a nightmare.
Both drops had to come from the exact same spot, meaning alignment was a major problem. After several failed attempts, I rigged up a simple fishing line setup to guide the drops and managed to sync the timing.
Then came another issue—clear water doesn’t look good in photos. I experimented with different liquids and eventually settled on milk falling into water mixed with food coloring to create a nice contrast.
So, what you see here is from the pre-auto dropper days—a crazy homemade contraption dripping milk from a funnel down a hose, through a fishing line, in a perfectly timed splash. The result? A drop colliding with another drop in mid-air—about one in every eight attempts.
This one was my favorite of the bunch.