high shutter speed for water drops

ninjarider

i shot this picture at 1/4000 of a second using an external macro flash with my 350d. it was focussed properly and the shutter speed itself should have been enough to freeze the water, so why is it so blurred ?
http://aces.smugmug.com/gallery/2799028#149372720

as you can see from this gallery (http://aces.smugmug.com/gallery/1522395#P-2-9), i have had reasonable success shooting water drops, but i succeed when i used my old olympus with on board flash even as low as @ 1/800 shutter speed or when i used the speedlite ex580 with the shutter open.


this time i tried using the macro flash ring with 1/4000 and it just didnt work. i tried the 50mm and the 100mm lenses. can u please help ? thanks.

hawkeye978

I wonder if you have a DOF issue. For this shot the EXIF data shows a aperture of f/1.8 which is going to give you the shallowest DOF on that lens. The previous pictures have a much smaller aperture (f/8 on some) which is going to give you more leeway. I can't quite tell from the picture because I can't blow it up that much but it looks like the free droplet is in focus while the rest of the frame is out of focus.

ninjarider

your observation is correct, this image is a shallow dof, however I see the same symptoms even at higher dof. I will reshoot and post at a higher dof. thanks

pathfinder

Your image is very underexposed also.

I cannot find a pixel above about 180,180,180 even in the specular highlights in the water.

The background, which I suspect is supposed to be near white, is a dingy gray near 140,140,140