Today I have spent about 4 hours mixing my drinks! Panic not, I’ve not drunk myself into oblivion over this challenge – I have instead been experimenting with mixing liquids with different viscosity to see the effect it has when pouring them drop by drop into a bowl of water – capturing the shots on camera as I go.
I tried;
- water with water ( see image above)
- paint with water
- milk with water (see image below)
- ketchup with water.
It is important for me to highlight that none of these shots have had a lot of post work production done on them – apart from a tiny bit of sharpening / noise reduction and cropping. The colour is exactly as it was when taken. You might, therefore, wonder how I have captured such vibrant and unusual colours…I used blue acrylic paint in the water into which liquids were poured to craete a vivid blue, and I also deployed tactic lighting around the transparent glass bowl to create the best effect. I found that white LED lights shone through the clear glass bowl, illuminating the water from bottom up created the most vivid blue shots. In contrast, a warm light from an up-lighter angled towards the glass bowl created the molten mercury effects seen in my other shots.
To take the shots I placed the camera on a tripod and located it about 50 cm from the bowl. I took the sun hood off my macro lens and used a remote shutter release to capture the images. I must at this point thank my very patient husband (Ali) for his help – he was responsible for assembling the tripod, manufacturing pipets for me to create the drops, pouring ketchup into the bowl and holding the up-lighter for me. This was definitely a two man job. Without his guidance on shutter speed, ISO and focus range I would still be there now trying to get the shots sharp.
It was the most challenging day yet – I took over 700 shots to get these few – and to be honest, they’re not the shots I was aiming for, but beggars cannot be choosers, and patience is not my best quality. Regardless, I hope you like these…no doubt I will be trying this again in the future to perfect and improve my technique.
