freezing rain 2

[Jack R Mann]

f 11 1/60 iso200 100mm 5dmk2 flash fill

[epmi314]

Jack,

The two ice shots with the droplets are pretty cool. I love abstract stuff. I do believe there is one thing you can do to improve them and that is to get rid of the trails on the droplets. If the surrounding light is dark enough then the flash will freeze the motion and the shutter speed is of lesser importance. However if you have some ambient light, fill flash or not, you will need a somewhat faster shutter than 1/60 to eliminate the trails. Great effort! Looking forward to Freezing Rain 3!

[Dave Humphries]

Hi there Jack,

I haven't seen the other thread as I type this, so forgive me if I am telling you something already covered there.

Looking at this one, I think the trails would be more acceptable if the drops were frozen at the end of their flight instead of the beginning.

You may be able to achieve that if your camera has a flash option called "second curtain" trigger, if so, turn it on and try again.

The feature of normal (first curtain) flash trigger is beautifully demonstrated here; the shutter opens, the flash fires, and the shutter remains open while the drop continues to fall and the ambient light is just bright enough to register this - hence giving a trail 'in front' of where it was when the flash captured it. The alternative is that our brains try to make sense of it; 'is it inverted?', 'are the drops being blown upwards?', etc, which distracts us from enjoying what you saw (without the conundrum).

HTH,