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Coca-Cola Abstracts

I'm very interested in photographing objects that bend and distort light by themselves. I noticed when I was drinking a bottle of coke that the patterns in the plastic cast interesting shadows so these pictures are the result of a fun afternoon playing with the idea. The setup was really simple, I took a few plastic coke bottles, filled them with water (to get a stronger refraction of the light), then used a desklamp as the light source and a piece of paper as the background. I used a tripod for stability with the long exposure times and in most cases used a small amount of underexposure to exaggerate the shadows.

The setup: desklamp illumination and a plastic coke bottle filled with water

For some reason these abstract views seem kind of sci-fi to me. They look like strange chrome or glass objects that to me seem a little alien.

Coke bottle abstract

I really had a lot of fun with this....

Coke bottle abstract 2

I'm going to keep my eye out for more interestingly textured plastic bottles...

Coke bottle abstract 3

Macro paper...

I'm working on a macro photography module and I have to submit 4 images of different subjects. I am really trying to avoid pictures of flowers or bugs. My high school art teacher once told me the hardest thing to draw is a screwed up ball of paper. I wondered if the same was true of photography so today I gave it a go.

The setup was simple: a sheet of paper that I twisted and crumpled, a desklamp for lighting, and a mirror tile to create reflections.

What I am struggling to decide is whether the results are cool or not. I would really appreciate some honest feedback on this one because I'm really on the fence. If you have time, give it to me with the gloves off, I'm a big girl...

Houston and Sons

Today I went off in search of more abandoned buildings for my ongoing module project and my search led me to Kennoway (or maybe Windygates, the towns run together and I don't know where the boundary lies). There I found a fabulous set of old buildings, full of all sorts of hidden photographic treasures.

I did cross a line though (actually it was a wall) and took a chance that no-one would spot me hopping over the knee-high wall into the complex of buildings which were obviously disused. I was spotted though, and Mr Houston himself showed up to ask me what I was up to. I felt pretty bad about trespassing, and after I explained what I was doing he seemed OK with it and said I could carry on. Still, it taught me a lesson that I've read in a lot of photography texts - always get permission. If Mr Houston had been less of a nice guy I could have landed in trouble. So from now on there will be no wall hopping for me....

Once we started chatting I asked Mr Houston what these buildings had been used for. Apparently this was a family business, which started as a piggery before becoming a haulage and engineering firm. The buildings I was photographing were mainly used as storage. The collapsed building to the right of the first photograph here was the family home in which all the 'and sons' (including the Mr Houston I met) were born and raised.

It led me to thinking, that the derelict old buildings I'd spotted from the road as a cool photo-op were actually an important part of someone's history. That even industrial buildings can have deep personal connections, and that in barging in with my camera I was intruding on more than just a piece of private property. It highlighted the need to approach each subject respectfully (as well as lawfully).

So an interesting lesson was learned through todays photo adventures, not just about the pictures themselves.

The atmosphere in the buildings was quite magical. I find it really intriguing to come across random items that show evidence of human occupation that have managed to outlive parts of the buildings themselves, like the remains here of what I assume was a mattress or bed of some kind.

Here a big porcelain sink appears to have a tree growing through it. All over the site was evidence of nature taking back the land.

There were even windows whose glass had survived where the frames and walls around them hadn't. They still looked so fragile, despite having outlasted far sturdier things.

There were no roofs on any of these buildings and it seemed really odd to see electrical sockets, and fuse boxes, sitting open to the elements.

It was a very atmospheric place. I'm glad I found it, and that it's owner was so understanding. It seems a shame that it's fallen into ruin now, but there's still something about the place that I think is rather beautiful.

Reflections on power

I'm continuing to work on the buildings and structures module that I blogged about some months ago now, and these are some of my latest efforts.

I'm still really intrigued by the idea of intentionally photographing buildings that aren't considered to be beautiful.

When I moved to Leven, one of the biggest downsides that I could see was the hulking giant of Methil Power Station, which sits on the shorefront and dominates over the beach at Leven (which is otherwise a very beautiful bit of beach). The longer I've lived here though the more my opinion of this building has changed. When I was running in the summer months it was the halfway point in my route, which left me with an odd feeling for it because it became a place I ran towards - a place that I struggled to reach and celebrated when I got there. It became a symbol of achievement. As a structure it's impossible to ignore. I've photographed it many times now and I now feel quite an affection for it. It's got character...but not for long. It's being dismantled and taken away piece by piece. I was surprised when I first realised that I felt sad about that....

So what of the future of the Leven skyline? Well change has already begun, with the opening of a wind turbine that sits right behind the site of Methil power station. It's a part of Scotland's commitment to renewable energy, it's a symbol in it's own right of things to come and hope for the future. A lot of people object to wind turbines for spoiling the landscape, but I think they're really rather beautiful. There's something so wonderfully elegant about it, depite its massive size it seems somehow delicate. I think that drawing some photographic comparisons between these two structures will defiantely form part of my submission for this module.

This final image is one I'm not too sure about. I would love some feedback on this if you feel like leaving a comment....In this picture I've taken just the reflected image of the wind turbine and rotated it make it look like the real deal. It has a ghostly misty quality that I liked. What I'm not sure about is the 'sky'which shows rocks and debris that were in the water. Initially I liked the idea that this turbine is a symbol of clean energy, and the sky appears to be full of debris, but now I'm wondering if its just confusing to look at. What do you think? Critical feedback is always very welcome!

Water Water Everywhere....literally!

It's a new year and I find myself starting 2011 doing exactly what I was doing this time last year - playing with water. In Jan 2010 I was on module 5, studying motion photography and 'freezing' the action of a dripping tap into a bowl of water. This time I'm revisiting this subject for my macro module and attempting to get a bit more technical....

I was inspired by the amazing photographs of Corrie White and her very helpful how-to-guide. Corrie uses approx. $500 of electronics to release drops at precise intervals and synchronise this with her shutter, but she also includes some good tips for using a more basic setup. The rest of this blog entry is the technical details and tips/tricks that I learned during the painstaking but hugely fun process so far....

The technical stuff:

This is Corrie's example setup that I replicated in my kitchen with an upturned chair.

An example of a droplet setup (see Corrie's guide for more...)

I played with various backgrounds and 'drippers' and 'drip recepticals'. The drippers I tried were - a plastic dropper which released drops when you squeeze the bulb, a drinks can with either a 2-3mm hole in its base or a 1cm slot (cut with a stanley knife blade), and a squeezy bottle with a nozzle dispenser on it. The dropper and the squeezy bottle gave nice small drops which were ideal for the individual droplet pictures (or pictures with just a few small drops like the one below).

The drinks cans were to create big splatty droplets that would stir up the water a lot and these created some of the most interesting shapes and multi-drop pictures (see below).

For 'drip recepticals' I tried a variety of different bowls and a oven tray. Because the depth of field of the macro lens is so shallow the ideal position to get the whole event in focus would be to photograph at 90 degrees to the drip stream. This is impossible though, because whatever you're dripping into will get in the way. The tray is the best option since it has the shallowest side profile so you can photograph at an angle flatter to the surface of the standing water. You do need a slight angle though if you're going to see the ripples. This issue meant that a lot of the time the incoming drip and the impact site aren't both in focus which is what you really want. The best you can do is increase the f# as far as possible with the fast shutter speed you need to freeze the action, and to image at as shallow an angle to the water surface as possible.

The camera/lighting setup that gave me the best results was as follows: Camera was tripod mounted, I used my Nikon 105mm macro lens with VR off (since this can actually add camera shake when you're using a tripod), on manual focussing (more on this later). I used ISO 200, f10-18 depending on the light levels, and a shutter speed of 1/250 to sync with the flashgun. I used both the on camera flash and wirelessly commanded my SB600 from it. Both operated on rear-sync. I positioned the flashgun at 90 degrees to the lens to give strong side-lighting to highlight the shapes made by the splashing water.

Tricks I used:

Focussing was a major pain. The key point is to make sure the 'dripper' (whatever it may be) is securely fixed and therefore dripping into the same point each time, when using a dropper I found this was really hard because just squeezing the dropper bulb was enough to wiggle the dropper around by a mm or so and this caused a lot of variation in the impact site. For later experiments when I was using punctured drinks cans a lot of the water was running off along the bottom of the can and dripping elsewhere, and depending on the amount of water in the can and the speed of the stream it's direction changed by a huge amount. It was worth the pain though because some of the coolest pictures came from the giant drops that these big streams created. For a fixed drip site you can put a focussing aid into the bowl centered under the drip stream (I used a small fridge magnet) so that you can then easily focus on that point, remove it and then away you go. For the big dripper like the cans, whose drip streams constantly changed direction, you just have to look through and manually refocus on what little you can see of the stream as it flashes past whilst tracking with the tripod. This is a painful process and you're relying on luck more than anything.

One thing to consider is the background you use. With a tray you can put stuff in the bottom, like coloured card, which works really well and 'colours' the water. For my favourite pictures I used a blue cleaning cloth and tucked under and around the pyrex bowl I was using. The texture of the cloth comes through in some of the shots and gives an impression of waves (you can see this effect clearly in the 'vortex' under the single droplet at the top of this post).

One neat trick is that the droplets themselves can produce images of what's behind them. I thought this was super cool and intially tried to give it something to image - I used a glass chopping board with an image of the manhatten skyline on it and placed it upside down behind the bowl (because the droplet will produce an inverted image). The trick is then to find the exact right distance to put the background image at, since you won't know the focal length of the drop - so again, relying on luck here. My best effort is seen here on the left, and below in closeup. It's grainy and ill-focussed, but you get the general idea. I might revisit this later....

Manhattan in a droplet of water....sort of.

Conclusions?

I found this to be seriously addictive. What I love about this type of photography is that there is a massive amount of luck involved, so you never know what you're going to get when you look at that viewscreen. You can spend hours (or at least I can!) fiddling with all the messy details and taking hundreds and hundreds of shots because you're convinced that the next one is going to be awesome. What happens most often is that there's no water in the photograph at all, or there is and it's badly focussed. But that doesn't matter if you just believe...I can see how droplet photography can become an obsession and why people would fork out $500 for the electronics to chase that dream of the perfect drop.

Brave New (Bubble) World

I've had a massive amount of fun this afternoon working on my Macro module. Inspired by pro-photographer Steve Hermitage's "Bubble Worlds" I set about creating my own....

Bubble World

The setup is really simple: a dish with very soapy water with black food dye added to it to get good colour contrast, a straw to blow bubbles in it, a flashgun and a macro lens.

The lighting was the hardest part, and it took me a few hours before I started getting the sort of thing I was looking for. The rainbow reflections are created by diffuse light, and Steve fired his flash through a soft box. I ran into difficulty with this because my Nikon SB600 can't be triggered off-camera without being slaved to the on-camera flash. The full frontal flash from the on-camera totally kills the rainbow reflections, so I had to use the SB600 on camera and angled to bounce off a diffuser. The problem this caused was that my bubbles were only lit from one side. The next time I do this I might try to rig up some reflectors. In addition to this I had to figure out the right combination of flash power/underexposure/aperture to get vibrant colours. It was frustrating because I could see it through the lens, I just couldn't capture it!


In the end I found a combination that worked with the setup. I blew hundreds of bubbles and had a whale of a time. I finally figured out the the most exciting bubble colour combinations come just when the bubble is getting ready to burst; the oil slides off the bubble surface into the liquid and then it pops. If you blow on the bubble with a straw it mixes the remaining oil with the black water and you get some gorgeous mixtures. The final image here was taken when there was virtually no oil left, just milliseconds before it popped.

A Bubble Moon perhaps?... Just before the bubble popped

In the end the battery ran out on my camera, if it wasn't for that I'd probably still be at it now. Grab some soapy water and a straw and give it a go! Although beware, huffing on bubbles with a straw does make you pretty light-headed.....