Project 365 - Day 10 - Colours again

All I have to say is I am not looking forward to my water bill this month .... :-)

This started as a simple experiment.  I had seen something like this done before, and the basic technique was described.  There were no setup pictures.  I made some changes which turned out to be problematic.

First of all, this is done with a very deep vessel.  It is a vase from one of the many flower arrangements that my wife has received over the years (some even from me! :-).  The shot I saw was done with a smaller vessle, which was about 2 inches across.  Mine is about 9 inches across, which means I had to close down pretty far - to f22 - to get focus across all the colour.

Initially I had the light under the vase, but that just highlighted the flaws in the glass, as well as any dirt spec no matter how small.  So I moved my white background away from the vase, and hit it with the speedlight to create a white background.  This worked.  Finally something was going my way.

Then came the drops.  Time and time again I tried to get something that I liked.  It wasn't working to my expectations, and I tried various setups.  I had to put the camera on a tripod to maintain a constant shooting angle, and I had to keep the camera perpendicular to the front of the vase.  I put tape just above the point at which the lens would pick up the drops.  So the pattern was, drop in food colouring, wait, take a couple of shots, drop more food colouring in, swear, empty vase, fill vase with clean water, place marker in vase to readjust focus, drop in food colouring ... etc.  I probably did this about 10 times.

But I got it.  I finally got two shots worthwhile that are sharp.  I stopped, ran downstairs with my media card in hand and fired up lightroom.  Not much adjustment here, just some colour enhancement on the magenta scale to bring out the purples.  I like that this shows the base of the vase as well.

Here's the shot:

ISO200, f22, 1/2000 using my 60mm again.  Oh, and by the way.  I used the pocketwizards that I recently picked up at B&H Photo in New York.  My pop up flash that I use to command my SB600s was reflecting in the glass and getting caught in my shots.

Here's the setup: