Project Paint Pour
Acrylic paint spreads through water during an experimental shoot, Friday, March 16, 2012.
Sometimes, when people ask what I do for a living, I respond, “I get paid to play with my toys.” And, while I’m sincere in this credo, the toys are often in use to realize a client’s vision, or to complete a client’s project. It’s not frequent that I have the time to take on a personal, just-for-fun project, even though there’s tons of ideas swimming around in my brain at any given moment. Unfortunately, many of those ideas would amount to long-term projects that my schedule just won’t accommodate.
Yesterday, my friend and fellow photographer Taylor Irby shot me a link to some fascinating portraits of ink being poured into water. I was stunned at the simplicity of what was going on in the images from a technical standpoint, contrasted with the beautiful complexity of the lines the ink was creating as it flowed through the water. I immediately knew I had to try this for myself, and I was thrilled that I had a fun project on the table
Very cool “experiment!” I love the bold colors you chose. Also loved the simplistic lighting set up. Reminded me of something I would see on Strobist.com
~Mike Mohaupt
Way cool, Simple things make the best images.
These are amazing and I can’t wait to try it later tonight.
Any tips for someone who doesn’t have strobes? I have a nikon 600 speedlight, the tank, but no strobes.
Thanks!!!
Ed
I actually used 2 small Vivitar 285 flashes to light these in addition to the Elinchrom strobe, so depending on your ISO and aperture settings, you might be able to bounce your speedlight off a white card behind the tank to achieve that blown out white look behind the paint. Alternately, you could try using continuous lights to light this, but they’d have to be pretty bright to get the shutter speeds needed (around 1/500th would be my starting point) to freeze the paint when it first enters the water – it moves quick.
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I’ll try it with some straight lighting as well as the flash. I’ll send ya a link with any luck I have.
Thank you so much for the article, it really helped solidify some questions I had before I try this out for myself. If you’re interested I wanted to share with you a video on youtube by the designer Alberto Seveso. In case you haven’t seen it already he uses an interesting method in order to blend the two colors together. . Thanks again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt2kVgChHU4