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Copyright by Corrie White

One of the most popular ways to use the Time Machine is as a timed trigger to photograph drops of water or milk as they splash into a surface. One of the first people to photograph these events was Harold Edgerton who invented the high speed flash and pioneered high speed photography. His "coronet" photos are world famous.

Without a an electric timer it's very difficult to capture the exact instant you want to see. The Time Machine makes it easy to photograph drops at any point in their fall.

Taken with the Time Machine

The most basic way of shooting drops is to arrange a drip that falls through the optical interrupter. This triggers the Time Machine, which waits a programmed number of milliseconds and then fires a flash. This is done in a dark room with the camera shutter opened in advance.

The Time Machine can also be ordered with an optional "Shutter jack" that is used with a second optical interrupter. The drop falls through both sensors. The first one opens the shutter, the second one times the flash.

Drop photography was taken to stunning new realms by a photographer named Martin Waugh. Martin invented the technique of dropping one drop on top of the splash of a previous drop, creating "drop collisions". This requires very precise control of the timing of the drops and the ability to generate them accurately. One of Martin's images is shown below. We make an electric water valve for the Time Machine that will let you experiment with this kind of photography.

Copyright by Martin Waugh

The Time Machine "Drip Kit" consists of a water valve attached to a reservoir to hold your fluid, a control box that plugs into the Time Machine, and a push button on a cord. You suspend the water valve over a baking pan with water in it and arrange your lighting. Then, after programming the various parameters for your session, you simply press the push button. This causes the water valve to emit one or two drops (as you choose), opens the camera shutter, waits while the water drops fall, and then triggers your flash at the precise millisecond you have set. The camera exposure time should have been set to some interval that will be long enough for all of this to happen. The shutter will close automatically after this time. The shutter is open so briefly that it may not be necessary to shoot in the dark.

The following slow motion movie shows the mechanics of a drop collision. Use the arrow keys on your computer to step through the sequence one frame at a time. You may also be able to position the cursor over the image and roll your scroll wheel:

 

 

 

 

 

The images below illustrate the precision possible with the Drip Kit. These images were taken one after another. The first drop has struck the pool and bounced up. A second drop is falling afterwards, and has just made contact with the first drop. The collision is beginning to spread into a sheet at the intersection. All three images are nearly identical, which demonstrates the accuracy and repeatability of the drops generated by the Drip Kit and Time Machine. All you have to do is press the button and everything happens automatically, after you have programmed the various parameters for your session into the Time Machine. To get different effects you can change the drop size, the interval between drops, the delay before the flash goes off, the depth and type of fluids, lighting, coloring, etc. These choices make the difference between mechanics and Art.

If you have QuickTime installed on your computer, the following movie will show you several drops in a row to demonstrate how the second falling drop is always in the same programmed spot, though the splash below it moves around.

The preceding photographs were all taken with a delay of 286 milliseconds after the second drop was emitted. The next three pictures were taken with a delay of one millisecond more. The second drop has now fallen a little farther, and has merged a little more with the first drop.

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