Method and Setup

Equipment:

Settings:

Distances:

My pictures were taken by using a pellet gun to shoot pellets through a water  balloon, see diagram below.  The pellet was shot down into a bucket of sand covered with plastic to keep water out of the bucket.  The balloon was hung from a hook on the gun rack before each shot and then I would load the gun.  I armed the sound trigger with the appropriate time delay and turned off the lights.  Then I opened the shutter of the camera with one hand and pulled the trigger on the gun with the other, and the pictures was taken.  See gallery for a complete viewing of best pictures.

Top, Front Setup

Click on image to view full picture.

The sound trigger I used was called The Time Machine, which had "shoot" mode and allowed me to digitally change the time delay.  I found that a time delay between 0.007 - 0.010 seconds gave the best results, depending on the height of the balloon.

The flash was set up with a variable resistor in place of the auto thyristor.  I set the resistor to 0 ohms to give the shortest possible flash.  

I used a shutter speed of 2 seconds so that I would have plenty of time for error when taking my photographs.  As a result, I had little trouble with the timing of my shots, but I did get some thermal noise in my pictures.  The noise wasn't very bad and I was able to take it out in Photoshop.

I had to use a large distance between the camera and the subject in order to increase my depth of field and still get a good exposure.  I took high-resolution pictures, however, and cropped the images so that they occupy most of the picture.

For most of my pictures I used a resolution of XGA Fine.  At the time I thought this was the highest setting, but there was one more higher setting.  Although I didn't use the highest resolution, my pictures still came out great, though not as large as I had originally wanted.

After I got everything setup and my balloons filled with water, it was easy to take a lot of pictures - I was only limited by the number of balloons I had.