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The following is a guide or "how to" on a photography experiment where you capture water drops in mid air with high shutter speeds, a tripod and a cable release. An DSLR or other manually adjustable camera is recommended for best results. This photographic exercise is obviously best done with a digital camera for instant gratification.

This photo gallery was inspired by a picture I saw on the internet somewhere of a perfect water drop suspended in air above a pool of rippled water.

I got out my Ambico tripod, my Nikon D100 digital SLR or "DSLR" camera, a cable shutter release, a glass bowl, and a variety of paper items to serve as a colorful background for the images.

For the water dropper you could use a plastic cooking syringe or a contact lens saline solution bottle.

I had to take almost a hundred pics to get a few of somewhat acceptable quality.

For the four pictures around these words, I used American dollar bills and twenty dollar bills to give an interesting green background to the water drop images.

I decided that the greenish paper currency was distracting from the pictures so I switched to the back of a SuperBike magazine with a colorful motorcycle advertisement.

It still seemed too dark and distracting so I looked for an alternative.

Photography is all about experimentation and trying new things.

Digital cameras have made it possible for all of us to fully explore any photographic avenue that we'd like to with minimal cost.

For this set of four water drops pics, I used a much lighter background and another halogen table lamp so that I would have more available light that allowed me to use a much higher shutter speed.

The higher the shutter speed the more "frozen" the action of the water drop will appear.

For the last few pictures of my water drop photography experiment, I grabbed a small bottle of blue food coloring and dropped a bright blue drop from high above the clear glass water bowl.

I was only able to get a few decent shots of the dye rebounding up out of the clear tap water before the blue coloring spread far enough to negate the sharp contrasting effect.

After the blue food coloring phase of this photographic exercise, I changed out the water and chose a royal blue sheet of paper as the background and a larger clear glass water bowl.

One of those resulting pictures became the background on my phone and is still there today.

It blends in perfectly with the "Blue Crystal" color theme on my Cingular powered Sony Ericsson T637 phone.