Photo A Day

Daily Dragon

One of the fun side projects I’ve been doing during 2011 is the Treasure Hunt – I had to find images to fit 75 different themes throughout the year. The first 12 were tied to each month, the rest could be taken any time. I rather enjoyed the search, and it gave me ideas for pictures during the year when I was a little short of inspiration. Here is a mosaic of them all for you to enjoy:
I enjoyed another water splash session in the studio yesterday. At last I think I’m making progress in terms of getting good shapes and more coloured lighting. The flash setup was pretty similar to this, but I was using various coloured gels on the perspex in the background, and the blue drips were plopping into a blue coloured bowl below, rather onto a hard surface. Here is a fun one to start with (milk rather than blue-coloured water):
There are so many variables you can tweak that it’s a good idea to just experiment with one thing at a time. Today I was seeing what happened with using drop 2 at about 75% the size of drop 1. The answer – interesting stuff! The collision “hats” seem to get thinner and longer tendrils appear. It also helps to add a few drops of Rinse Aid to the pool they are splashing into. Here are a selection of the best ones which nearly made it for Day #1443:
With my current valve sensor setup, the depth of water in the valve reservoir is also pretty critical – once the initial measurements are done, the timings can vary wildly if the head of pressure changes too much – so I was tending to keep it topped up between 25-30ml for each shot. This gave me much more consistency and stopped me from going mad. I really need to build a Marriotte syphon to get around this issue. But that’s for another day.
It might be fair to say that I enjoy playing with my food from time to time. There’s nothing better than a photoshoot after which you can eat the subject! Today I had an idea for some splash shots showing a runny boiled egg and soldiers…
There was no way I was letting sticky egg yolk anywhere near my valve sensor – that would be a sure way to bung it up for good. So I improvised with skimmed milk and yellow food dye. The results looked quite convincing!
Incidentally, I got to eat the hard-boiled egg yolk before the shoot this time – as I wanted it out of the egg but left the white to contain the splashes nicely.
This set follow on well from my Coffee Cliché series. I can see the basis of a theme developing – watch out for more in future!