Capture Photos of Water Droplets with This Arduino-Controlled Rig

While we normally take water for granted in our everyday lives, if you were to zoom in on drops as they hit another larger body of water, it’s quite a beautiful process. In his write-up, alexpikkert explains that he’s been shooting water droplets since 2017, and was extremely excited when he was successfully able to photograph a drop's impact. He was even able to get these drops to collide, though his earlier techniques still took some fiddling to get this working correctly.

His latest rig, based on this Arduino Drop Controller on Photobuilds, takes things to the next level, using a pneumatic-style solenoid valve to release each drop. A wooden stand positions the dropper above the contact surface below.

With this set up, a delay time value between release and photograph can be input into the Ardiuno Uno controller, and tuned as needed. Between one and three drops can be selected, and the size of the drops – based on the valve open time – and the delay between drop releases can also be tuned.

An opto-isolator is used to trigger the flash needed to capture the instant of impact, and another controls the shutter release of the DSLR camera. A third opto-isolator is used to trigger an IFR520 MOSFET at 12VDC, which activates the droper solenoid.