Crystal Clear

I've been setting up this shot for three weeks, and decided to shoot it tonight. Day 174 is all about crystals!



I've been growing these from a kit for about three weeks now. They are horribly delicate so getting them into the lightbox was a challenge. Thank you to my wife and her delicate lady fingers!

These crystals are pretty much pure white, so I gelled up three lights for this, red to the left, blue to the right and green above, all diffused through the lightbox, all firing at 1/8th power. The camera was shooting at ISO 200, f/9, 1/200th shutter.

Not much else to add, not great photography but fun photography! Wheeeee!

Sick of ice yet?

For day 54, one more ice cube shot. Last one I promise, at least for a while.

The reason is that I wanted a different treatment of a similar subject. Last time, I was blowing out highlights, and getting tightly cropped, so this time I went low-key and gave it some space in the frame:



Shot on black fleece which does a really nice job of killing any reflection, and it only needed very, very minimal cleanup of light spill. Basically, twenty pixels or so of gray right haloing the base of the glass, the rest of it is clipped. This was accomplished with the 580EX II off-camera, shooting down from above, and snooted with a Honl flexible snoot/bounce card.

The shot might have been better with a second point of focus, because otherwise there is just a lot of black, but so be it. It looks like I expected, good or bad.

Secret of the Ooze

Day 53 of my Project 365 rolls around, and I am sitting on a big pile of green, red and blue ice cubes. I can't help play around with them.

I wanted to see what they would look light heavily backlit, so I rigged up a clear plastic berry dish on some of my daughter's Megabloks (high tech all the way here) and used that to place my 580EX II underneath, triggered with my Pocket Wizards. Killed the lights, set up a black screen around it to keep out any ambient, and shot from above:



ISO 100, f/10, 1/60th shutter. I can't help it. Every time I see this, I think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. I have some other ideas for these cubes, so hope you don't mind a new shot with them every now and then. They are fun to play with.

On a more serious note, I am very, very close to registering a small business and trying my hand at some simple part-time portraiture work. Some of the people I have done shots for are prepared to give me referrals and it would help to finance some new equipment if I could write off purchases against that income. It's not an unreasonable idea... I hope.

A Splash of Colour

Day 50, and this has to be a quick post before I make dinner.

I finally found a flat-sided acrylic container to do more water shots with, and I had the idea to freeze some ice cubes with food colouring in them.

Add the two together, and this is the result:



f/25, ISO 100, 1/200th shutter. 580EX II on-camera at 1/2 power. I should have tried to lower the flash power and blow out the background more with a larger aperture, but I wanted to really freeze the action. Freeze. Ice. *snicker*

Really like this shot though. One of my best I think.

The builder and bane of Empires.

For day 21, a simple shot of something with an amazing and complex history.



Salt founded kingdoms in Europe, brought Italian city-states to war with one another, was interdicted by the British in the American Revolutionary War, and instigated a march by Gandhi. Salt was used as a weapon against a defeated foe, allowed intercontinental travel and was responsible for huge networks of roads in several ancient Empires. In the Bible, salt was referenced as a form of payment, and it coined the phrase 'salt of the earth'.

The history of humanity is tightly tied to these tasty little crystals.

ISO 100, f/16, 1/160th shutter on a blue background, with both flash and supplementary fill light.