Jason Tozer: Fire & Water
Following on from the successful Planet Tozer project for Sony, Jason Tozer was once again asked to shoot a series of pictures on its behalf, this time using the new Alpha 900 digital SLR camera. His subject: water droplets.
In the latest in our series of CR Commissions (our joint projects with commercial partners) Tozer was once again asked to shoot a series of pictures on behalf of Sony, this time using its new Alpha 900 digital SLR camera. His subject: water droplets.
Clicking on each image will take you to the much larger version, housed on the CR Flickr page. The full set, including more like these, is here.
As the camera has a very high number of megapixels (24.6, making it, Sony says, the highest resolving DSLR) the idea was to shoot an object and crop into a section of the photograph to show the detail. In this way, Tozer was able to create the first image in this post (top) by extracting it from the larger image, shown below.
"You dont really take a picture and think, 'look at the resolution on this!'" Tozer says. "The times you need a hi-res chip are when you want to crop into an action shot – cut into it and know you have enough left for a useable file. We shot something very detailed this time, so that if you isolate a section of a larger picture, there's still enough information there that the new image isn't breaking up."
![]()
"I'm shooting with three different light sources in three different colours, with different speeds of flash on each colour," says Tozer.
"The green light shows the droplet sharp, the red light captures it moving, giving it an ethereal quality. Then we brought in the yellow-white tungsten light. Using them all means that some of the image is sharp, some is moving. It's like the water's on fire."
![]()
"With the shutter open more, you get these really long fiery trails," says Tozer. "Some droplets look like they have smoke coming out of them..."
![]()
As often the case with Tozer’s work, the set-ups used to generate the photographs are quite low-tech in their construction. Here, for example, are some behind the scenes pics of Tozer and his assistant creating this current series of images.
More info on the camera can be found here.













