Monday, March 26, 2007

Water Drops on a DVD series 1-1


Water Drops on a DVD I
Originally uploaded by Dalantech.
It was raining, and I was bored. So I decided to try my luck at shooting an abstract since I couldn't chase critters around. After experimenting with a couple of different flash setups I finally hit on something that looked good, but was relatively simple to do.

Take a DVD and coat a small area on it, just larger than you're going to film, with canola or some other cooking oil. Then put a couple of drops of water on top of the oily surface -the oil will increase the surface tension between the water and the DVD, so that the water doesn't flatten out as much.

Now take the cardboard from a 4x6 inch photo paper package and wrap it in aluminum foil. No need to be gentle, since you don't really want a perfectly smooth surface. Use a rubber band to attach it to your flash, and bend the last few centimeters of it at a 90 degree angle. Bend your flash head at about 45 degrees and lay the whole thing down over a DVD so that the flash head is past the water drop. The trick is to get a lot of light on the DVD but not get a reflection from the flash.

The final image was converted from RAW with no changes and I used Noise Ninja to pull out sensor noise. Saved it as a jpg and I was done...

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