Week 1. No, really!

Thar she blows, my picture for week #1, posted at the last possible minute. An illustrious start :)

My daughter is an avid collector of 'Littlest Pet Shop' toys, and some of them are nicely decorated with style of scrolling linework. They can actually be quite attractive, so I thought I'd put this little fishy to work in a splash picture. I figure when you need to get your creative juices flowing again, go with what you know and what you like, and I like splash shots :)

Taken with my 60mm Macro at f/6.3 with a three-light setup (left and right through the softbox walls, and background lit from above), triggered remotely. I had two other ideas that I shot today, and neither worked but I like this one. It's simple, but the colours are good and the focus is not bad.

The eye is slightly out of focus unfortunately, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the paint is a bit blotchy on the toy. Still, perfect focus when dropping a buoyant toy into water with razor-thin depth of field is going to be really hard to achieve. At least the fins and bubbles are all nice and sharp.

Dark Autumn Water

I decided to do a set-up shot tonight trying to capture a bit of the fall season.

I found a leaf that had a nice golden colour and just a hint of curl from drying out. I use a glass casserole dish on a black sheet, got the camera low and had the flash off to camera left nearly parallel to the water surface to pick up some of the minute surface ripples.

Here is the result:



I'm really, really happy with this shot. I expected the leaf to look nice, and the ripples just blurring off in the foreground and background are what I was hoping for on the clean black background. Where I got lucky was the crisp reflection. I was dropping the leaf and clicking away madly, so to catch it just at the point of contact with the reflection was a real bonus.

I'm just happy that I had an idea, shot it, and can be this proud of the result. Consider me rekindled!

Mercurial...

Today, I combined my love of flower shots, water shots and inverted trickery. Day 188's shot:



In this shot, a blue background is placed behind my acrylic tank and lit with a speedlite off to the side, and a softbox is overhead of the tank. The flower if held down into the water, and air bubbles are blown up from below it. Invert the shot in post processing, and you get what looks like mercury drops on the flower.

I've seen this technique used before, and my shot is not up to to par of a lot of the other ones I've seen. My bubbles are too big, and I think my setup is a bit amateur compared to the others, but it was a fun shot to do!

Kersplash! Pre-and-post...

I didn't have a lot of time to shoot today, but my daughter was splashing in her pool in the back yard when I got home and I took some pictures just for the family. This turned into a good opportunity though, a chance to practice some post-processing and evaluate my technique. Tada! Day 180 post!

First off, here is the shot I kept straight out of camera:



As you can gather, if this is the best shot that I took, the rest were not very good :) She doesn't like getting water on her face, so her expression was always equally demented in the other shots.

Anyhow, post-processing was:

- Straighten
- Crop
- Fix white balance
- Sharpen
- Curves

Here is the result:



The curves adjustment is from an action set that I liked from DeviantArt, but dialed in to my own preference, and normally toned down to about 30% opacity. It just looks right to me this way.

So, this is the process I go through, more or less, for all my shots. The curves adjustment is not always applied, but this is the natural light set that I prefer for portraits.

Thanks again for reading, your comments are always welcome!

Green tea, too!

I had a shot in mind for a few days that I finally got to shoot tonight. Day 168 is a redux on my earlier 'Green Tea' shot.

Here is my new shot:



There is trickery in this shot too, but not digital. This is shot upside down, with the stream of 'tea' shooting upward into the cup. The cup pushes the stream out to the edge and that gives you the 'crown' of drops.

This needed a fair bit of light to clear the backdrop and freeze the action so there is a little more blowout in the drops than I would have liked, but the lead section of drops is nice and crisp, so I think the effect worked. This was list with two LP160s on the background (on high and one low) and the 580EX2 on-camera to light the front at about 1/16th power. This lighting allowed me to shoot at f/7.1, ISO 100 and 1/200th shutter.

Ugh...

Today's picture did not go well. I was trying a technique from a site, and it just didn't work. The best picture I managed on day 164 was a heavily cleaned up shot that I took to preset my manual focus for the actual shot.



Oh dear. Quite a letdown after yesterday's shot that I quite liked. Win some, lose some.

I have round two of engagement photos with the same couple tomorrow, so I'll take an off day today if it means I can be on my game tomorrow. I'm really preferring to shoot portrait right now anyhow, so I'm happy about it!

No birds today!

On day 140 I got ambushed. As soon as I walked in the door, my daughter was all excited to tell me that she had been gathering twigs all day and that we were going to walk down to the park at the end of the street and toss them in the lake, and it would make the biggest splash ever.

Once again, I know enough to follow the orders of the women in my life.

I unloaded the groceries, grabbed the camera, and headed out with my little girl. I took about two dozen shots, and decided that this would be another good opportunity to work on my post-processing.

I hope you like the results!







Thanks for reading, your comments and criticism are always welcome and wanted!

RGB

So I was a bit rush for shooting on day 133, and I've been moved to a new office at work that is not downtown, so my opportunities there have pretty much vanished.

I was screwing around with my reflection setup, and decided to try not blowing out the background completely. The reflection and refraction of the light made some interesting gradients, and I decided to add more glass, water, and a splash of primary colours.



This is pretty much just an experiment but I kind of like it! I also lit the setup from above and below the glass platform instead of on the sides as well, so there was a change in reflection from that as well.

These sorts of shots are helpful to me. I learned a fair bit, and I got a good result in a fairly short time. Also I learned that hand blown crystal glasses are not always the same height even if they came out of the same box. Who knew?

Splish, splash, splosh...

Walking down to the mailbox to get the days pile of glossy advertisements can turn into a nautical adventure when you are four years old. It also turns into a photo opportunity for Dad, although trying to keep her out of traffic while keeping the camera dry and carrying three packages was a bit of a joy.

Once again, I was working on trying to improve my post processing, so there is a few different filters and effects applied. I wanted to keep the mood in the cloudy-and-rainy realm while still making some colours pop.

Here are the two shots I kept today:





These were both shot at ISO 200 and f/3.2 to bring up the shutter speed a bit. I wanted any splashes to be well frozen, but lighting was a bit challenging. These were taken at 1/400th and 1/500th respectively.

On a side note, I returned the 70-200 f/4 today, and my search for an f/2.8 IS might have turned up a winner in Toronto. We'll see what happens...

As always, thanks for reading. Comments and criticism are welcome!

Rain, rain, rain!

So we have been having a bit of a drought in Winnipeg this spring, but the rain is finally coming down. Just in time to turn into snow during a cold snap tomorrow, ha!

When it rains, I can guarantee that my daughter will want to go 'puddle splashing', which always ends up with her getting absolutely drenched from head to toe. I don't mind, it's part of growing up, right?

Part of the fun is seeing how much water she manages to get into her boots, often it seems like there is more water in there than the boot should be able to hold. That's the subject of my picture for day 121:



Not a lot of new ground in this picture, but this is another case where I'm polishing a shot based on my experience with similar shots. I think I did well here, using the angle of the shot to create a little more interest, solid focus, and the lighting seems well balanced. The colourful boots really do set this whole shot off though, and she loves them so all is right with the world.

On a side note, my little guy is recovering fairly well, but we have to keep a close eye on all of his incisions, and watch his intake and output to make sure his systems are recovering from the anesthetic. It's not at all pleasant, but in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse. He's a tough little dude.

I'm alive!

Sorry for the lack of posting the last two days, I've been shooting but it's been family stuff. A violation of the 'Project 365' rules maybe, but not the spirit :)

Today is day 115, and here is a shot that I came up with while doing dishes, of all things:



Basically, this is water streaming through a plastic colander. The 580EX II speedlite is on the left at about 1/4 power and green gelled, and the LP120 is on the right at 1/8th power blue gelled just to give a little contrast. I expected slightly more blue tone in the shot, but I liked it enough as is. Focus is pretty good, but I couldn't manage much more crispness at 1/200th shutter. In hindsight I should have used the long-shutter-manual-strobe technique with this shot, but I didn't think of it until I was in post-processing.

April showers...

Today was supposed to be a days of shooting at the Manitoba Museum, and when I arrived I pulled out the camera, snapped on the flash and the Omnibounce, fired it up and proceeded to cuss myself out as the screen displayed 'no card'. AGH!

So, a new plan had to be hatched for day 94. This was not an incredibly welcome development given the standard family activities on Easter Sunday. Fortunately, our potluck dish was already in the slow cooker so I had some time to research ideas, and I had some time after the dinner to devote to actually shooting the thing.

Tonight, the goal was to shoot something that I would normally shoot specifically just for colour, and to make it work in monochrome.

First, here's the shot:



My thought was that I needed another point of interest beside simple a strong colour, which I admittedly rely on in a lot of simpler shots. I wanted more contrast, more texture and more detail. Part of this came from the water droplets, and the rest came in bloom selection/composition and post-processing. I wanted to insure that the stripes on the petals were in sharp focus and prominent in the shot, and that the light would be nice and soft, while creating a strong definition between the foreground and background, so this was shot with off-camera flash and an umbrella very close to the flower. Contrast was also cranked up a bit in post to give it a little more pop, and green filter effect was applied to smooth the highlights in the petals.

All in all, I think this translated well to monochrome, and that was the goal. Not too bad for a shot that I never intended to take today!

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.

It's not just for icing...

Day 52 and I did another reshoot of a concept I had earlier. I like doing this since it helps me see where I've improved both technically and artistically.

Today I tried a reshoot of the idea I had in this shot.

Here is the result today:



I would say that this is an improvement :)

The only thing I couldn't quite nail is the slight shadow band across the middle, which as far as I an tell is caused by the acrylic box that this was shot in. I thought I had enough light on my background, but perhaps not.

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.

Deep Blue

Day 28 of my Project 365.

I *liked* my prior water drop shot, but I wanted to try and nail the focus a bit better. Instead of just doing the same shot, I backed the lens off from the splash, set up both strobes and shot in a clear acrylic container on a royal blue background.

Here is the result:



I like the structure of the splash, and after a bit of tweaking in PP, the colour has the richness and deepness that I was looking for. The focus is better, but there is still a blur from the limited shutter speed. I can only sync at 1/200th, so that's the best shutter speed I can manage. If I could crank it to 1/400th or so, I suspect it would be like crystal.

I'm going to have to figure out how to manage a faster sync in the future, but I think it's a limitation of the camera body and strobes.

p.s. I noticed a bunch of new followers, thank you all for joining in! If you are doing a Project 365 as well, be sure to drop me a comment with your blog address, so I can return the favour!

Making a splash!

Day 17 of Project 365.

Today I took inspiration from another local photographer and her shot of a water drop on a CD. My original plan was to try and duplicate it, but with a little variation.

I used a DVD instead of a CD, but my first few shots showed a lack of colour variation in the DVD. Instead of switching to a CD I decided to run with it and tried to catch a splash.

I took a few dozen snaps, wore out a set of batteries in my flash, but I got a decent one:



I blew the focus on this, if you notice the sharp drops in front of the splash it's obvious. Having said that, the leading edge of the splash is respectably in focus, and the bokeh is not hideous. It was the best splash I captured by far.

ISO 200, f/20 at 1/200th shutter. Manual flash settings at 1/2 power, on-camera.