Flavoured Echoes

Some people make big plans for their Saturday, others eschew the outside world and cozy down with  good book and a glass of wine. Me? I geeked out over photography.

Although new to photography, for the longest time, I have been wanting to play with water and ink and getting up close shots of the action. Not sure why, I just did and on Saturday night, I indulged, with help (turns out I needed a lot of help).  I was introduced to the tripod, the lighting we have (we used doubled-over white silk held on with elastics to diffuse the light), the D300, and camera settings.  The set up isn’t slick but it was a good start:

Set up for the macro play on Saturday night.

Once everything was set up, and I knew what was going on with the camera, I dropped in the dyes and Chris manned the shutter release with instructions to shoot continuously.  For the first round of shots, I played with food dyes and started by using red, then blue.  One colour was not particularly interesting so I tried red, then yellow, then blue together.  Here’s the shot I chose and played with in Aperture:

Red, yellow, blue drops

I used the Club House food dyes that come in the tear drop bottles, very easy to squeeze out a drop at a time.  I am pleased how it turned out. I then pulled out India ink to play with and was surprised at how it reacted in the water, very differently from the food dye.  I got a lot of tiny black tendrils, and the drop became was less puffy and more defined.

India ink drop

Taking the photos was a lot of fun, then the challenge was to pop them into Aperture and choose a few. I have accepted quickly that I need to take a lot of shots (over 200 this time) to give myself a chance to find the couple that I like.  I put 4 on Flickr and even that seems a bit excessive.  Really, who wants to poke through photo after photo of the same subject? I should have chose one from each set but I got excited.

As much as I like going outside and taking photos of the city, it’s nice to stay instead when the weather turns nasty (we had snow at midnight, it’s May 9th) and see what you can do with what you’ve got.