Euphoria

An hour after my first blog and finally I got a hang of the functions within blogger.com! I got the feeling that the site doesn't run well on Safari. It was kinda slow in loading the pages and photos. Well, at least I can get up to speed with the posting now that I become more familiar with the features.

As my disastrous idea of freezing motions continues, I became more ambitious with the idea of freezing water.Since it was terribly difficult to do a self-portrait (probably pressing the camera remote and splashing a bucket of water on myself at the same time!), I turned to splashing water on objects instead. First, I used a wine glass, but it turned out ugly after 20 shots. No matter how I composed it, the glass just didn't gel with the background and lightings. So I used a perfume bottle instead and tried several composition, before I decided to face it flat towards the camera.

Next I single-handed poured water from a used 1.5L of Pokka bottle onto the perfume, while the other hand was busy with the wired remote as I poured. It was night time, so I could take out ambient light completely. After 50 shots, I previewed it with Lightroom and I kinda like this shot most. With the selected photo, I removed the water flowing on top of the perfume bottle with Photoshop. Then I colour corrected it using the techniques prescribed by Lee Varis from his book - SKIN. (Yeah I know, the technique is meant to correct skin tone, but it works in this case too!)

As for lighting the bottle, I placed one strobe right above the bottle and surrounded white cards on the side and front. Since I am using a strip lightbox, I had to cut off excessive lights by placing black cards on the lightbox.

The speed of the water flow in this photo is definitely slower than my mom's spray! And I guess the motion is better 'frozen' this time, though it ain't perfect.

Hmm... what objects should I try using next?