Nikon D5100
35mm Prime Lens
ISO100
f/8
SS 1 sec
I’ll be honest, I had to google the meaning of this weeks challenge and wasn’t massively happy with what I saw. It was simultaneously full of potential but also seemed so boring, I couldn’t really think of what to do so I googled some popular images and came up with the top left of the one below:
I had a quick practice, broke out the speedlights and triggered them from the body flash to try and capture the water in motion being poured from a bottle and quickly realized this isn’t how they achieved that image due to how the water behaves when it’s poured.
With this I went back to thinking, it must be poured, also, all the flash reflections (even with a polarizing filter and flash diffusers) in the glass must mean it’s ether back or top lit.
So, come Thursday night and it being (a conservative estimate) around a billion degrees I couldn’t sleep so figured I’d have another go and broke out all the gear (the fun part of breaking out is all the gear, the downside is having to put away all the gear when done).
I stripped the reflector off my giant diffuser and set-up both speedlights on remotes behind it to back light on full power, lined this up behind the sink and set the camera up at the far end of the counter on the tripod so I could capture the water being poured (I’d actually picked up some cheap raspberry cordial as I thought the undiluted mixture would be a little more syrupy and give it a little more body to its movement).
The results weren’t too bad – with a couple of obvious flaws:
The big flaw being fingers. We don’t drink so we don’t have any stemmed wine glasses which I could’ve then cut off with the fake reflection/table.
Also, I shot this a little late, the timing between tipping and using a wired remote to fire the camera (I figured wired would be a little more reliable than the cordless as the infrared one doesn’t always shoot when you ask it). This has led to it looking a little obvious that it’s being poured out, I guess instead of going all the way pouring I could’ve just jolted the glass to get the liquid to escape too.
I also didn’t do the reflection as well as I could, it looks quite obvious but, to be honest, I couldn’t really care, it could be it was two in the morning but mostly it’s the fingers – there’s no way around that it’s going to look fake.
Now, I could’ve gone out and bought some stemmed glasses for this and re-setup and re-done the shoot but my curiosity was sated. I’d worked out how to get the image I didn’t really want to go through all the hassle to actually get the image. If I need a shot like this, I know how to go about it, but right now, can’t be arsed.
So, this moved us on to having to do another shot and I was a bit of a loss until I saw some glasses lined up at work and each looked to have a smaller version inside it due to how the glass warped the view behind it.
I thought I’d isolate off some we have at home and grabbed some black paper from the local craft store and made a mini-studio drop but the black in the card was a bit reflective and bright (if you can say black is bright?) so this meant I struggled more with the lighting as I couldn’t have the aperture/iso/exposure (take your pic) too long otherwise you’d start to see the shoddy card box.
So using the flash on a remote held above to bounce off the ceiling to diffuse and soften the flash I went through and tried several setting before getting what I thought was a good enough mix – using helicon remote to set the focus (with a bike light to see what I was doing). The end result I’m thoroughly ‘meh’ about, it’s not what I had in my head, the glasses we have at home warp and distort unlike those I’d seen at work and having to make the image dark enough to not see the framing means the edges of the glass just disappear into the background.
I guess there was going to come a week when I didn’t enjoy the challenge so much, my inspiration was off and I’m not happy with the result – but that was bound to happen sooner or later and at least now it’s over with, roll on next week, hopefully we can get back to something that’ll spark the ol’ grey cells and light up the imagination.
Maybe I should’ve just recreated my “Han Shot First” picture I put on Instagram a few month back…
Effect works quite well, have shot a fair few of the christmas lights out of focus in the background there so I can overlay these into other pictures in the future.
I’m presuming this is the technique Pol used (though probably a timed shot rather than remote, as he has great detail of his hands in some of the shots – I lost detail on my left arm trying to get the remote to fire).
A little behind the scenes, top image is the selfie set-up and the bottom is the cuppa – I figure a camera on a tripod for the sunset is fairly standard and folk know what that looks like :p
