A Scenic World

Yesterday while browsing the net, I came across some water droplet photos. You know the kind – wonderfully sharp, perfect outlines of the drops, beautiful colors in the background. I thought back to a memorable afternoon in my old apartment, right after I got my first DSLR, when I let water drip into a pot for hours and tried to get shots. Without a doubt, that venture was a failure. But surely I’ve learned a bit more about photography since then, right?

Right?

Things I learned today:

• an off-camera flash is not a necessity, but it sure makes thing easier
• I don’t need a fancy hot-shoe adapter to attach my flash to my spare tripod; the flash worked best placed sideways on a book
• milk stains granite

Allow me to explain. I started out with a bowl of water in a fancy bowl Jens bought me for my birthday. I had the flash on its fancy hot-shoe adapter, attached to my spare tripod, pointed down toward the bowl at an angle. I attempted manual focus. This is the best I got:

Part of my problem was that I was not delivering the water in a methodical way. I just kept dipping a paper towel into another bowl and then squeezing it over the bowl (I had the end of the towel turned to a point). I improvised a system by borrowing this granite picture-holder thingy of Jens’ that had long metal arms sticking out of it to hold the photos. I put one of these over my fancy bowl then took off the shoestring of my shoe and tied one end to the picture-holder. Perfect! Now I just squeezed the water over the shoestring, and it dropped perfectly each time. Still, this water wasn’t that awesome. I’d heard that oil is interesting to work with, so I added a layer of vegetable oil.

Oh, God, no. Now it just looked like a goopy mess, which is WAS. I washed out the bowl and decided to try some milk. Unfortunately it meant I was going to have to waste a lot of milk, but hey, it’s for art!

Focusing was still the hardest thing to do. The bowl reflected any lights on in the apartment, so I basically sat in the dark and tried to focus with my right hand while my left dripped milk on to the shoelace with my only source of light the bright flashes from my onboard and external flashes when I tripped the shutter.

I found that the best method was to allow an almost steady stream of liquid to flow down and right as it tapered off to snap like crazy. I tripped the shutter by hand and with a remote, and honestly I didn’t notice a different in the rate of keepers. Both resulted in almost none.

Of course, sometimes you ended up with too many drops in the photo:

As I said, the attrition rate was insane. I shot something like 683 photos today; about 30 were keepers. A lot of them were just bizarre-looking landscapes like this:

Of course, even that’s better than what most were…..

…which is nothing at all:

Still, it wasn’t a total failure. In fact, some of these I even like! You can see the entire set by clicking here, or you can just look at this one:

By the way, I made an incredible mess, and milk DOES stain granite, or at least it leaves a weird residue. Also, my shoelace now feels a little crusty, even after I let it soak in soapy water for a while.

I spent the weekend with Jens’ family in Eppstein and had hours to wander around his mother’s lovely garden. This one little purple flower caught my eye because of the translucence of its petals: you could almost see the yellow center glowing through. This was the first shot I took, probably from knee-height:

Nothing too inspiring there, but you can get an idea of what the flower looked like. I got closer and focused more on the base of the flower, with the petals going out. I tried a few times, with this one being the best:

Now, it just so happens that I took a lot of photos that day and needed the card space, so I went through all the photos to delete the ones that were terrible. While I scrolled past this set, I was struck with A Realization regarding the composition: the base of the flower and the petals weren’t the important components, the black space was! The negative space, as it were. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the photo that it’s only small things like this – the positioning of that black space – that take a photo from so-so to great. Luckily only a few minutes had passed, and the light was still right and the flower was only 15 feet away, so I went to shoot it again and got the shot I wanted:

I normally have all my camera settings set to “boring” – almost no contrast, no saturation, no sharpness, no noise reduction, etc. I like to do all of that in post-processing. This photo above looks boring, certainly, so the first thing I did was increase the contrast, increase the exposure, and increase the blacks:

Finally, I added some split-toning because for whatever reason, the original periwinkle just wasn’t appealing to me. Also, the petals are the kind that shimmer, and I wanted to bring that out. So I made the last few adjustments, and ended up with this:

No assessment of this shot would be complete without a shot of what I look like when I’m taking this kind of shot. I only own about three pairs of pants that don’t have faint stains at the knees, and it has become second nature to roll up the shirt sleeves before planting my elbows in the mud. Because this is the way I take most of these shots (thanks to Jens for letting me link to his shot): http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3362/3438919457_b28632f177.jpg

#268: Overgrown

This was not the idea I had for today's self-portrait, but it developed organically (ha!) when I decided to take a shot that reflected (ha!) the weather. You see, it's been raining/snowing/sleeting all day here. I keep finding myself at the window behind my desk, watching the stuff drip from the sky while trying to figure out just how solid it is. I noticed that my breath made the window fog up and thought "Perfect! I'll fog the window in the back door, stick my hand with camera out, and take a photo with everything foggy except my eyes!"