How To Create The Perfect Milk Splash Outdoor

I have been writing for DIYP for over a year now, and I can’t believe I haven’t written an article on how to create milk splash shots. It is, after all, one of my favorite things to do (and it is amazingly easy). So, here it is. This will be a two part article. In this article we will be doing it outdoors using only ambient light and reflectors and next week we will bring it indoors using strobes.

What you’ll need:

Some milk (duh!)
A glass or a cup (depending if you are a tea or coffee kind of person)
A Strawberry or a Carrot
Shutter release cable (optional, but will make your life easier)
A spoon
A camera (double Duh!)
A fast (prime) lens
A Tripod
A Reflector

What you’ll do:

1. Prepare your shooting area. For this tutorial we are using ambient light only (strobes next week) so find a well lit area. I picked our garden for this project and was shooting around 1PM. For my base table I was using a DIY Wood Planks.

2. (Optional) Thinning the milk: If you don’t want to waste too much milk, you can mix it with water at about 1 part milk to 2 parts water ratio.

3. Put some milk in the glass and pre-focus on your subject. Set your camera to manual focus once done focusing.

4. Get your reflectors and light the glass (I was using a DIY reflector made our of cardboard and silver wrapping paper).

5. Camera settings: you should try to get a shutter speed of around 1/2000 or faster. (you may have to get your aperture open all the way, this is ok, you’d get a dreamy feel for the photo). I was shooting in manual mode, ISO200, 1/3200 shutter, f2

6. After doing some experiments for the splash, I found at that the best object to use to drop on the milk is a strawberry or a cut carrot.

8. You can shoot using Continuous High mode or Burst mode. If you are doing this alone, use a shutter release cable so you can trigger the camera with one hand, and drop the fruit with the other.

9. Drop the object and click your shutter.

10. Use your spoon to get the carrot or strawberry out of the cup and repeat.

TIP: Dip the strawberry in the milk just before dropping it, some milk will drip and will help you aim.

Editing:

Here is a quick tutorial on how to get a dreamy feel on your photo.

1. Open your image in Photoshop.

2. Adjust using levels or curves.

4. Create a new layer

5. With the gradient tool select Linear Gradient

You can try the colors that I used or you can play around with different colors.

6. Select colors as shown below

7. Change the blend mode of the layer to Soft light .(You can also try using other the other blend modes. Lighten, Screen, Soft Light, and linear light works best for me). Adjust the opacity and feel of the layer. (My Opacity was around 61% and fill about 80%)

8. (OPTIONAL) I wanted a little bit more color to the shot. So I added another layer of linear gradient with a different color and repeated Step 7.