Fun with Food Coloring

29. December 2015 · Comments Off on Fun with Food Coloring · Categories: Photography

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to get the camera out so I jumped at the oportunity to take some pictures when Lisa came to me with a request.

Lisa wanted some pictures for our bedroom and she liked some food coloring images I took a couple of years ago. The idea is you get a fish tank, fill it with water put a white screen behind the tank and light that with a couple of speed lights. After positioning the camera in front of the tank you drip a couple of drops of food coloring into the tank and shoot what happens. Pretty easy really. The nice thing is every shot is different, unique.

The trouble is I no longer have the fish tank, I threw it away when we moved house. Lisa really wanted the shots so the other day she went out and came home with a couple of fish tanks, one the same size as the one I threw away (2 foot by 1 foot) and one tiny one (8 inches by 4 inches) used for a single fish. She didn’t know what size tank I needed so bought two.

So today we decided to take the shots and see what we could get. Lisa’s idea was to have three landscape orientated pictures in the room, all printed on canvas. So she got some food coloring and the fun began.

I decided to try the really small tank as after every attempt you need to change the water in the tank (you only get one go each time), and a smaller tank would allow us to move much faster. Fortunately the little tank worked fine.

In the end we had a cool little production line going.  I took the shots then Lisa changed the water.  She then wiped the tank while Abi removed any bubbles on the inside using an old credit card (funny I know but it really worked).  Then Lisa and Abi squeezed the food coloring into the tank and off we went again.

Lisa LOVED the results and decided to have a fourth image that was wider that could go above the bed.

Anyway, after 160 pictures (yes that’s how many times we had to change the water) we ended up with around 10 images we liked and picked four for the bedroom, you can see those below.

If you ever want to try this you should really give this ago, it’s surprisingly easy to do and actually a lot of fun.

Christmas Card Pic Time

13. December 2015 · Comments Off on Christmas Card Pic Time · Categories: General

So here we are super close to the Holiday’s (that’s Christmas for those of you in England), and we needed some new pics to put on our cards.

In the past this has been a pretty painful experience for everyone. I wanted to create some nice pics for Lisa (so the pressure was one) and James and Abi were made to clean up and pose for pictures (which they hated).

However, over the last few years I’be got a lot faster at capturing these types of images and this year I wanted to be especially quick as we were planning on taking the pictures outside in the rain! Redmond town center has a nice Christmas tree and we thought it would be nice to shoot the kids in front of that. As you would expect the weather was crappy with a light rain coming down the whole time.

To make this super fast I grabbed my Fuji X100T camera which is a fixed focal length (35mm) camera so I couldn’t zoom in or out with he camera. This made me “zoom with my feet” and enabled me to quickly position the kids in front of the tree and grab the shot.

Obviously it was dark out (these shots were taken around 6pm), so I needed some light on their faces. Now I could have gone nuts and got out any number of lights and light modifiers but I again chose to go really simple. I grabbed a single Nissan i40 speed light that I triggered off camera using an infrared trigger. The camera, light and trigger all fitted in my coat pocket and were super easy to set up and use.

I just held the light at arms length off to my left pointing in the general direction of James and Abi and took the shot.

Each image took around 15 seconds and we captured the shots we wanted super fast. James’ girlfriend Bale was with us and he wanted a couple of shots with him and her and we captured those really quickly too!

Lisa was pleased with the images and James and Abi were happy as they didn’t have to stand in the rain for a long time (something that would have been the case a couple of years ago). I’ve clearly come a long way.

Anyway here are the three images that are going on the cards.