The secret behind this image is catching the right moment. If you shoot a fraction of a second too late the effect is gone.
Even when shooting at the right moment though, there is still one part which remains left to chance. This surprise, the fact that you get to see something which your eye can’t see because it is so fast, is what makes it so fascinating to me.
To be able to catch this very precise moment, you need some technical help: a sound trigger in this case. To freeze the motion the Scoro power pack with its very fast flash duration of up to t0.1 1/10000 s is guaranteeing the perfect result.
One Striplite 60 is placed on the right side, one Softbox 30x120 is lighting from the top (both these lights are for direct reflections in the glass and water). One P-70 with a honeycomb grid is lighting through the upper part of the plexi plate and creates a gradation.
The procedure as follows: in the dark studio the shutter is opened (important: the modeling lights must be turned off), with the noise of the glass smashing, the flashes are triggered by the sound trigger, then the shutter closes.
One difficulty I had was that sometimes the lights would flash more than only once while the shutter was still open, this because there was more than just one noise.
To avoid double or triple flashes, I set the Scoro on a sequence of 2 and chose a very long interval. In this way, the sound trigger would trigger the first flash with the first noise, the second flash though would flash only after the interval time (and the interval time must be longer than the shutter speed), i.e. after the shutter had already closed.
