As Dave Chappele said it almost 17 years ago in his famous comedy series the “Chappele’s show”:
Everything looks better in slow motion.
As a content creator, shooting slow motion has always been a fantasy of mine. As I’m sure it has been for many of you.
Growing up in the industry in the past 2 decades, we learnt shooting that slow motion was only a luxury which was only available in film cameras.
But in the past few years things have changed for the better. Specially in the past year 2020
image capture technology seems to be one of the fastest growing trends. In the year 2020 Canon and Sony put out their best not film mirrorless cameras and they just blew everybody’s mind away with their specs.
8k, 4k 120 fps, 10 bit. These were only luxurious specs that very expensive camera carried.
Lucky for us now, with this trend ; Every year that goes by we get access to affordable cameras with specs that we could dream of only half a decade ago.
Five years ago I got my Sony alpha 7S2 which was able to shoot 4K at 60 fps. It was the first camera that was able to shoot so flawlessly at night, which only cost around 4000$ at its time when it was released.
Five years later I purchased an upgraded version of the same camera allowing me to shoot double the frames in 4K and 4 times more of that in HD. And most importantly I can now shoot 10 bit..
Never thought I would say this this early.
The 7s2 120 fps in HD mode was not really usable at all due to it being 8 bit, and it was a bit blurry too.
After having my hands on the a7s3, I really have just been experimenting with its amazing 10 bit 280 Mbps image quality. I really haven’t had a chance to put its high frame ability to test until now.
I guess we can all agree that one of the best scenarios to shoot in slow motion is; when things are being dropped into water.
So I went ahead and ordered a big enough fish tank to be able throw stuff in it.
The dimensions were 50x30x30
That meant you can’t really drop any hard objects heavier than 150 grams in because you could probably break the glass and have water all over your floor.
So to be safe I decided to use fruits and a small 50 ml perfume to drop into my fish tank.
To give the commercial cinematic look I placed a black backdrop about 2 meters away from the fish tank, With my main light placed right above the fish tank looking down with a honeycomb grid to avoid any light spilled on my black background.
I was shooting on my a7s iii in 4k 120 fps, and my focal length was 100mm.
After My first tests, I ran into two main issue;
- The depth of the tank was 30 cm, with apertures of 2,8 or 3,5 things ended up being blurry as seen in the video. So I had to stay around f7 in order for these objects to be completely in focus. But of course we all know what happens when you do that, I had to bump up my iso dramatically. Luckily the sony shines in this department.
- Second problem was; even at 1/240 sec of shutter speed, there was a ton of motion blur when the objects were being dropped into the water. So to avoid that I went up to 1/600 sec. This made my scene even more darker but again; All it took for me was to bump that iso to 8000 and we were ready to rock and roll.
Another Tip to take into consideration would be having a black or white table to have the fish tank placed on. Mine was orange wood color and I was seeing its reflection at the top of the tank in the water.
Everything I talk about I documented in the video, If you plan on doing this for the first time. I suggest really keeping the fish tank clean throughout your shoot. Because you will see any small piece of hair or in my case was the lemon pulps.
And last but not least if you want to get really nice splashes of bubbles in the water, drop the objects from a higher elevation. Just no Hard object though ?
I really enjoyed this experience. You should try it and leave a link of your work in the comments section.
Have fun and good luck.
