Shooting pouring water

[batey_1020]

So i just sold all my digital equipment and was after a project that might see me get through some film and get some interesting shots.
I want to shoot water pouring into a wine glass with the kind of splashing effect.

Ill be using my Pentax spotmatic with 55mm f1.8 and probably HP5 plus. I have a sunpak 522 flash and a canon 420ex speedlight. I will probably be shooting on a white background.

My questions are...

How would you set this up?
Using constant lighting or using the off camera flashes?
I would assume i need to be shooting at about 1/1000 or faster to capture the sharp image?

Has anyone done this lately and has some general tips.

 

[batey_1020]

Thank you very much for the link. Should keep me busy for a while

 

[giellaleafapmu]

What effect do you wish to obtain? I remember some old master saying that with water you either let it go (really make it look flowing) or you completely freeze it, anything between is not going to work. This translate to: you either use a long exposure time and no flash (or a rear curtain sinch if your camera is capable of this and you need light for some other reason) or you freeze completely the water with a short flash (usually this means having the flash at low output). Now, once you have decided what you want and assuming that you really need artificial light I think that most of the techniques used to photograph glass work (well, or at least they are a good starting point). The basic ones you find in manuals are dark foreground, light foreground or a mix of these, roughly speaking you are either aiming to hit the edges of the flow with light coming from behind a dark foreground or you are putting light to the foreground to have it come from the back and through the water or...well you are doing a combination of both. If the water is a not a nice laminar flux, as in water coming from a tap, I would go for the second techniques or for a mix because there are many edges to hit.

I hope it helps, if someone have corrections or tips about alternative techniques I'd be very interested in them because half of what I photograph is made of transparent media such as glass, pottery, wine, beer, wine in glass, bees in glass...ok you got the point (or the pint)...

GLF