How To Create The Perfect Milk Splash In The Studio

Last week I made an article about How To Create the Perfect Outdoor Milk Splash, so this is the Part 2 of that article and how to do it indoors or inside the studio using a flash.

What you will need

A Camera
A Speedlight (such as YN-560 II)
Colored Gels (This pack from Rosco is pretty nifty)
Wireless flash trigger
Some Milk
A Glass
A Tripod

First off, I prefer using a speedlight when doing high-speed photography because I use a Cheap Branded Studio light which has a slow duration and can’t really stop the motion of the droplets. If you’re using a high end studio strobe (see comparison here) you may get faster flash duration so you can use that, sadly, this is not an option for me. Speedlights it is.

Using cheap studio strobe

Using speedlights

What you will do:

1. Start off with setting a table, move it at least 6 feet away from the background. (This will help with reducing the spill of your main light to your gelled background). Place the gelled speedlight at the back pointing at your background. I was using a white seamless paper for the background and was playing around with different colored gels.

2. Next is your main light, place another speedlight left or right of your subject.

As you can see I was getting some spill from my main light and that was hitting my background and washing my colors, so I placed a black illustration board to flag the light from hitting the background.

Flagging the main light

3. Place a reflector on the opposite side of your main light to fill the shadows a bit. I placed my small DIY reflector to the left of the subject.

Small reflector for fill

4. The trick with stopping the motion of droplets inside the studio has nothing to do with shutter-speed. The blur is controlled by the flash duration of the strobe. My shutter was set at 1/160 (which is my highest sync speed) and was shooting at ISO 200 f4.5. Both My speedlights were at 1/4 power.

5. Place the camera on a tripod and shoot. Remember to pre-focus on the subject and move to manual before you start. Now, you just need to click the shutter at the right moment. My speedlight isn’t capable of shooting a burst so I was shooting a single shot and cleaning the spilled milk after each shot.