LPS#16 Behind the Scenes

LiquidAir · November 26, 2007

I've had a number of "how'd ja do that" requests, so I figured I'd start one of these threads. Feel free to post your own "behind the scenes" in this thread.

LiquidAir · November 26, 2007

The Making of Buoyant

I started working on this project back during SF3. It’s been the back of my head for a long time; what prompted me to start working on it was indiegirl’s post about starting a new job. The original idea was to take a shot of a hand throwing a wine glass up in the air. My initial idea was light the glass and the hand from the sides and show the moon with and stars in the background. I knew we were going to have a full moon at the end of the round, so if I could sort out all the technical difficulties in advance, I’d have a chance to shoot it before the round closed. I won’t go through all the details of how I planned to shoot it, but it involved a fishing line, a pulley and a weights. However, shooting just before the deadline is dangerous, so out in the back yard I went to throw some wine glasses as a proof of concept. It sounds crazy, but here is an early test shot:

I was throwing them over the lawn and using tough glasses so luckily I didn’t break any. I did, however, have to take a shower afterward to wash off the cheap wine. At this point, aside from issues of composition and focus, I have two major technical issues to sort out. The first is that the dark background doesn’t show the color of the wine well (this shot is actually water, so you’ll have to trust me on that). The second is that the liquid holds its original shape much longer than I expected. To my eyes anyhow that hard line on the surface looks too heavy for the buoyant feeling I am going for.

I tried a lot of different things and was just not making progress. The appearance of weightlessness clearly takes more to develop than I can reasonably allow a cup to fall. However, I had seen a shot on Flickr which managed to create sometime akin to what I was looking for with bubbles in an aquarium. Luckily I happened to have an empty aquarium sitting around so I set it up in the living room (conveniently the rest of the family was away so I had the space to myself for a few days).

Here is the basic setup I used. I have the black muslin set up because at this point, the final shot is still supposed to be against black. The lite disc and strobe are there ostensibly to serve as surrogate for the moon.
Getting the light I want against black is proving difficult, so I moved the disc down while I worked on sorting out the bubbles. Those of you who followed the MA#1 lighting (in the Technique/Assignements section) will recognize this setup. The only difference here is that I pointed the strobe above the frame and am shooting against a gradient as the light tapers off. The rays you see in the light are a by product of the less-than-ideal spot grid I am using on the strobe. Mostly they are a detriment, but here I think they are an asset. In the first setup shot, I triggered the strobe behind the lite disc (along with some other lights) so you can see where I pointed it.

With what I think at the time is a temporary light setup, I start working with the glass and bubble. What I do is fill the glass up with air and press is to the bottom of the aquarium with the tip of a table knife. Here’s a test shot for that strategy:

The bubble looks better than the wine did, but not by much. After taking a lot of test shots, I came to the conclusion that to bubble remains in the glass until the glass is fully upright before they separate with the bubble rising and the glass sinking. It is this shot that prompts me to go back and look carefully at the original aquarium shot. The first thing I notice is that he has cropped the base of the glass out of the shot. Suddenly it hits me—he’s holding the glass out of the frame.

Ok, this just won’t do.

I realize (as I have been thinking for some time) that I am getting further and further from my original concept. The next step is one step too far; I am really not interested in a shot that doesn’t include the entire glass but I can’t see how to get anything even close to what I want without seriously intruding into the frame. Briefly a rig with lead weights and a fishing line floats through my head, but I dismiss it as far fetched with out a much larger aquarium. I am not really ready to buy and fill a 60 gallon aquarium just for one shot. So I take a break and grab some dinner with the idea that I am going to tear down and start working on something different for the round.

During dinner, I realize that I can cheat. Yep, cheat. Back at the aquarium, I take a bunch of shots holding the glass like so:

and a bunch more holding the glass like so:

I loaded my first batch of test shots into the computer see of the Photoshop work was going to look decent. Since the shot was taken on a tripod, no cloning is necessary and combining the images is nearly trivial. The image I submitted was the first pair I put together. When I looked at the result, I finally saw the feeling I was looking for. I spent quite a while looking at it before concluding that finishing my original plan (shooting against black with the moon, stars, and a hand) wasn’t really going to improve it. So I cloned out a bit of tank detritus, uploaded it, and submitted.

KurtPreston · November 26, 2007

Thanks! I was quite keen to know how you did that shot myself

It is very beautiful.

Tango · November 26, 2007

that opened my eyes up allot, really, thank you for sharing!

Felicia · November 26, 2007

LiquidAir wrote:

The Making of Buoyant

Cool factor: 10/10!!!!

clap

Felicia · November 26, 2007

My setup was very simple. I did a photography fundraiser with my Moms group to raise money for a foster home in our area. I did one day of shots near a lake and another day at my house. Since I don't quite have the funds for a set of studio lights, I setup my backdrop in front of my garage in the shadow of my house. Because it was outside and in the midmorning, there was so much ambient light bouncing off of the concrete driveway and sidewalk that I didn't even need to use a flash. And that's it.

shatch · November 26, 2007

Brilliant!! Love the process and the outcome! Well done and thanks for sharing the behind the scenes!

imax · November 27, 2007

As I told you several weeks ago, Very Nicely Done, another Semi Final Entry

As for this round I had numerous ideas floating around in my head.

My first thought

Wasn't happy with the way it was coming out so we switched to plan B

Fire is always exciting

But once again I ws not happy with it.

The bar has been raised on what needs to be submitted and now I look at it like this. Is the picture I'm submitting worth hanging on someones wall.

So I was working late the other night and happened to come across this lit basketball court at 5:00 in the morning. Someone forgot to shut the lights. I had a Basketball in the car so

through trial and error and after about 25 shots this was the result. Right out of the camera, no processing except for cropping and a slight turn to straighten it out. I like the way it came out and it is an idea worth revisiting and playing with in Photoshop. But I am trying to do everything in camera now or at least for the next few rounds.

Congratulations everyone on some interesting photographs. Looking forward to seeing some growth and decay pictures. Should be fun

Joe

Dalantech · November 27, 2007

Thanks for the explanation LiquideAir -very cool!

The shot you linked to on Flickr has me puzzled. If you look at the exif data he shot it at 1/4000, F13, and ISO 200. Does the diffuser you use slow the flash duration down so much that a high shutter speed is necessary? It seems to me that he could drop the shutter speed down to sync (1/200 or so) and still get a sharp image -the short duration of the flash would have frozen the motion. When I shoot macro above life size the shutter speed I use (1/200) is irrelevant, since the flash is the only light source that the camera is recording. So what I'm really doing is a form of stop motion photography. Do the same principles apply for a shot like the one you linked, and the one you entered in LPS16?

FWIW: The weather here has been odd: One day warm the next day cold. One morning at work I found a half frozen wasp so I took him home, put him on a sheet of photo paper that had some honey on it (to keep him busy), and photographed him at four times life size at my kitchen table.

LiquidAir · November 27, 2007

Dalantech wrote:

Thanks for the explanation LiquideAir -very cool!

The shot you linked to on Flickr has me puzzled. If you look at the exif data he shot it at 1/4000, F13, and ISO 200. Does the diffuser you use slow the flash duration down so much that a high shutter speed is necessary? It seems to me that he could drop the shutter speed down to sync (1/200 or so) and still get a sharp image -the short duration of the flash would have frozen the motion. When I shoot macro above life size the shutter speed I use (1/200) is irrelevant, since the flash is the only light source that the camera is recording. So what I'm really doing is a form of stop motion photography. Do the same principles apply for a shot like the one you linked, and the one you entered in LPS16?

It is possible he was using high speed sync, but my guess is that he was shooting in a portrait studio with hot lights and a seamless backdrop. The pattern of light in his shot looks to me like the light was hitting the backdrop at an oblique angle which suggests to me that the light was in front of an opaque white backdrop rather than behind as I did it. He has rotated his image 90 degrees (up is to the left), so when he was shooting the light was coming in from the left of the tank. If I am right, he has some serious lighting gear; 1/4000 @ f/13 is about 4 stops brighter than daylight.

Here's a couple nuances I discovered when setting this up:

You don't get those nice gradients in the glass unless the backdrop is a fair distance behind the subject. I thought I was going to tape paper to the aquarium, but that doesn't work nearly as well.

The bubble acts like a fisheye lens and shows the entire room. In my shot you can see the edge of the lite disc as a hard line. The disc was the biggest backdrop I had, so I tried to place it in a way where that line fit well. Luckily it is round, square would have not worked at all.

Putting those two bits together, I think his setup was in a large studio with a 9 foot seamless. It looks like he placed his spot right up against the backdrop and hid it from view in the bubble by aligning it with the stem of the glass.

Dalantech · November 27, 2007

LiquidAir wrote:

The bubble acts like a fisheye lens and shows the entire room. In my shot you can see the edge of the lite disc as a hard line. The disc was the biggest backdrop I had, so I tried to place it in a way where that line fit well. Luckily it is round, square would have not worked at all.

Thanks! I've used that lens effect to my advantage in a few images.

Kinda cool to take a look at what someone else has done and reverse engineer it -I've learned a lot about photography and scripting from doing it

rgbivens · November 27, 2007

Very cool...I knew you used a fish tank and what not but I didn't know you used two images and cloned them together. Thanks for the tutorial.

-Grant

LPS#16 Behind the Scenes

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