Saturday 1 December 2012

Fun Stuff Around the House

I decided to try and have some fun photographing things from around the house over the past few weeks.  I've come across some interesting articles showing how some of this is done, so I thought it was high time I tried it for myself.

First I photographed an oil and water mixture.  I used a low glass dish to hold the liquid in, and propped that up between a couple of chairs so that it was suspended off the floor.  The trick is to have the bottom of the dish completely clear of any obstacles!  I placed a colourful sheet of paper underneath the dish, and bounced my flash off the paper to the bottom of the glass dish.  The results were fantastic - I'm looking forward to trying it again! I'll also take an overall shot of the setup for you to see.




© Daniel Menheer




© Daniel Menheer



Secondly I photographed drops of water falling into a pool of water.  The setup was fairly straight forward, but does take a bit of time to get it ready to go.  It involves having a plastic bag of water suspended over a dish of water (I used a paint dish for this).  I placed a colourful sheet of paper behind the dish, and bounced my flash off the paper.  Lastly I poked a small hole in the bag so that the drop of water was falling in the same location each time.  The tricky part was focusing on the right spot.  You can use a pen or pencil, placed at the same location your drops of water are falling, and focus on that.  It might take a bit of fine tuning, but this will get you pretty close to start.  You're then ready to start the photographic process, which can take some time to get the results you want!




© Daniel Menheer



Lastly I photographed patterns of smoke.  The set up was simple, though I did not have an incense stick to get a nice continuous stream of smoke.  I had to settle for some old candles, which worked okay, but only gave me a small window of time to make some images.  Next I took a headlamp to light the smoke from the side (this was just to help with the focusing!), and set up my flash across from the headlamp.  I had to set up a snoot of sorts on the flash so that the beam of light was focused on the smoke itself, and did not spread to the rest of the room.  Lastly I set up a black sheet behind the candles, far enough back to get minimal fall off from the flash.  Again, I love the results, but I'm looking forward to trying it again with an incense stick in order to get more images to play with!

Out of camera
© Daniel Menheer



Inverted in Photoshop
© Daniel Menheer



Keep coming back to check things out - I'm hoping to try some more fun stuff in the near future!

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