In the frame - 42/365

In the frame - 42/365
Originally uploaded by MarkyD31

Theme Problems

Sorry if you're getting confused visiting my Blog. I'm trying out some new themes and I've changed the layout about 20-30 times so far this evening. Please bear with me as I'll have it sorted by the New Year :)

A Candle's Tears - 38/365

A Candle's Tears - 38/365
Originally uploaded by MarkyD31

Here's some background about todays shot. I started off this morning with an idea about shooting some water drops. I initially shot some little cacti that I have in pots that had been sprayed with water but they weren't really working. Then I tried pencils, feathers and eventually candles. A little tweaking in Photoshop got the required results for the Flickr post. Image was tightly cropped, colored and sharpened. I really liked the way the flame reflected in the drops and will definitely do this again. Some of the discarded shots are below.

There were a couple of shots that almost made the grade out of this shoot. One was a macro of the feather shot. When zoomed in, I could see the studio lights reflected in the drop and it made quite a comical look. The other was a crop of the pencil shot. As shot it was pretty uninspiring but when I was editing it, I had the idea to turn it upside down.  This just gave it a little quirkiness that I liked.                                          

Anyhoo, here they are:

One last thing, I had a strange thought when I was processing the candle shot, that it might look good with an image of an eye superimposed into the flame !!!!! but it just looked naff......

.....so it got binned.

Thanks for reading and see you soon.

Mark

Couldn't resist another post of some more water drops.....sorry.

I've always admired photos of water drops that I've came across on the internet. There's something magical about how they are caught and frozen into the shapes and patterns that we're all familiar with. I've always wanted to have a go at producing some images and as I was pretty much stuck indoors this weekend due to the dull, damp weather, I thought I would give it a go. I had a trawl around the internet for some hints & tips on how to do it and was quite surprised at how easily you could set up the shot. Getting the results would take a bit more effort though, or so I thought ! I was incredibly amazed at how easy it was to get some pretty decent shots from my first few attempts. A bit of tweaking (and a LOT of shots later), I was getting, what I thought were some great images.

Anyhoo, I thought I would post a quick tutorial of sorts here for anyone wanting to give it a go. There are many articles and blogs online that pretty much say the same thing as I'm about to say but one more wont do any harm :-)

First of all a location.  As I'm pretty tight for space and my usual "studio" a.k.a. the dining room was being used by my wife for her hobby (quilting), I opted for the next best place......the bathroom. Actually the bathroom makes an ideal "studio" as it's fairly easy to make dark and you have a great huge light box sitting there disguised as a bath (assuming it's white).

So, for the set-up. A plastic bottle was suitably prepared. I used a "sports" type bottle with the pop close top. This allowed me to regulate the drips quite easily from a slow trip to a trickle. A couple of holes in the bottom and some string threaded through gave me my drip source. This was hung above the bath.

So, basics first. Tripod, obviously, camera set to manual, 1/100, f/9.0. I used a medium telephoto setting so as not to get too close to the splashing water. I set the drips going and when they had settled down into a steady rhythm I held a match where the drops were falling and manually focused onto that point. I used an IR remote to trigger the camera. So now onto the important part, the lighting. If you try and light the drops directly you'll end up with not much at all. The trick is to bounce the light from your background, in my case the inside wall of the bath. In this set-up, the lighting was very even all round. You may need to experiment and maybe even use a second flash in your set-up. Now this is where I became decidedly nervous. I had my Nikon SB900 flash unit perched at the end of a bath full of water and I was in the pitch dark!!!! A quick Heath Robinson set-up with towels and tape made me a bit happier. I had the camera set to trigger the flash remotely and the flash was set at 1/128th power. This low power setting gives a very short duration flash which helps to freeze the drop. As I did, please experiment with flash/exposure settings until you get some decent shots.

So off we went, drips dropping, flash flashing and camera snapping. I fired off about 20 shots and then stopped for a preview of what I had. This was my 6th shot....

Quite good I thought and carried on. This was 4 shots later....

Now at this point I was quite encouraged by what I could see on the camera screen and decided to have a better look on the computer. Card out, downstairs, into Lightroom for a better look ! This is where I found out I had left my camera set at ISO400 from earlier in the day. The resulting noise, especially at the tight crops I was using was just a little too much for my liking. So a friendly reminder to make sure you set your ISO to the lowest possible.

So, camera properly set up, it was back upstairs to resume shooting. A few dozen shots later and I was getting some images like this....

Now I was in full swing and was trying every combination of exposure/aperture/flash setting I thought might work. One thing I did find out was that if I set the camera on bulb, opened the shutter and fired the flash manually on 1/128th power I was getting shots that were sharper and clearer.....

Now onto post production. All shots were loaded into Lightroom for initial cropping, exposure adjustment, white balance and noise reduction before transfer to Photoshop for final tweaks and colour. Most tutorials suggest adding colour at source i.e. as the background but as I couldn't do this easily in my "bath studio" I decided to add colour post production. So after a couple of hours experimenting and tweaking I was getting images like this......

Im happy with these but I will be trying more. I hope this little post has helped and if you need any further info please ask and I'll do my best to act confused. Failing that, there are loads of GOOD tutorials on-line that can help.

Thanks for reading and please have a look at my other images here

Photoshop Pollock - 34/365

Photoshop Pollock - 34/365
Originally uploaded by MarkyD31

Mucking about with various brushes and effects in Photoshop tonight. This really struck me as being not too bad ! I'm definitely going to explore this technique some more and print some examples out for the wall.