Project 365 - Day 8 - Colours

I was reading a magazine I had bought about a year ago and found inspiration for today's shot.  This one is pretty cool.  My first couple of attempts are pretty good, but I feel that I can nail down the process a little better.  Finding the correct setup was the most difficult part, but once I got that going it wasn't bad at all.

The shot is oil on water, shot through a glass dish that has a colour splash underneath.  I aimed a speedlight at the colour under the dish and blocked the flash so it wouldn't spread up to the bottom of the dish (you can see this in the setup pic below).   I had to manually focus on the surface of the water - my camera's auto focus wanted something there to focus on and I had not added the oil yet.  So I floated my trusty tea bag package on the water and focused on that.

After I added the oil, I played with moving the droplets around using a spoon.  Oil is very hard to control on the surface of the water, but I got along pretty well trying to guide it.  If I went too close, the oil drop would join with an adjacent one and just make that one bigger.  Turns out that it's not as visually pleasing.

Also, there is text stamped onto the bottom of the dish, so I had to shoot around that.  Here's the shot.

And here's the setup.  Paint cans hold the dish above the colour print.  My tripod allows the legs to go out horizontal, so I have one leg braced on the cupboard.   The speedlight is under that piece of white paper to the right of the setup aimed directly at the colour.  It's set to -1 stop and fires remotely using my camera as the master.