I had this itch over the last 3-4 days to try a new technique. One of my favourite professional photographers, to whom I owe most of my knowledge in photography, is Mark Wallace. In one of his recent Exploring Photography video tutorials, he demonstrated the technique of high-speed photography by using a very simple setup – a tripod-mounted camera and an off-camera flash. So I decided to give it a try and photograph a strawberry plunging in milk.

The technique itself was fairly trivial. Simply set the camera to manual mode with a long exposure (over a second) and a small aperture to get a decent depth of field. Turn all the lights off, trigger the camera, drop the strawberry and just as it hits the surface of the milk, trigger the flash. Needless to say it requires a lot of coordination and patience before you get a decent shot, especially when you are trying to do this all by yourself without someone helping you or any wireless triggers!

Shot with my Canon 60D and Canon 100mm F2.8 macro lens at ISO 100, F16 and a 4 second exposure. Flash was set to manual at 1/16th power.