Juvenile experiments
Discussion
In the interest of posting piccies, here's a few experiments I was doing the other day. I was pretty much inspired to do this after remembering an image of a lemon someone posted a while back - that was an excellent picture. So on a quest to learn a bit more about photography thought I'd give the technique a go too. Anyway here's 5 shots of my best attempts - (that's 5 of about 300 I took). They were all taken with a 50mm lens manual focus at or about f2.5 and at 1250 in my kitchen with card or a towel as a backdrop, and a couple of anglepoise lamps. Experimented with slower speed but they weren't great. Also the reason they're all a bit grey is at the time I hadn't yet completely figured out how to get white's really white - thought it was to do with white balance, but finally figured out it was more to do with exposure - so finally started playing with exposure compensation which fixed it - still learning.
Any comments greatfully received.
1.
2. 
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4. 
Then I got a bit cocky and tried with some dice - here's a set. Seem much harder to capture. But my wife hates them as she thinks they're contrived - I thought they were arty !!!!
5.
>> Wish I'd made them all the same size !!!
>> Edited by rhubarb on Wednesday 22 February 21:14
>> Edited by rhubarb on Wednesday 22 February 21:15
Any comments greatfully received.
1.
2. 3.
4. Then I got a bit cocky and tried with some dice - here's a set. Seem much harder to capture. But my wife hates them as she thinks they're contrived - I thought they were arty !!!!
5.
>> Wish I'd made them all the same size !!!
>> Edited by rhubarb on Wednesday 22 February 21:14
>> Edited by rhubarb on Wednesday 22 February 21:15
to get your whites white you need to hit them with enough light to make the values in all channels 250+ or they will always appear to be grey. and to make sure you have balanced properly or they will have a magenta/cyan/yellow cast
try shining a light directly onto your background either from infront or behind if you are using paper as a background.. if you light it from behind the water will appear to be alot crisper and cleaner rather than murkey...
good effort though...
try shining a light directly onto your background either from infront or behind if you are using paper as a background.. if you light it from behind the water will appear to be alot crisper and cleaner rather than murkey...
good effort though...
dcw@pr said:
higher shutter speeds needed, and some sort of laser trigger system.
When I was at school an A-Level Engineering student was trying to capture shots of ball-bearings falling into water.
It was very simple, nay Galilean in operation. He built a tower about 4 feet tall with a T-piece on top from which he could drop two ball bearings simulatneously, one off each end of the T.
He put a beaker of water under one side, and a camera under the other. Ball 1 makes the splash, Ball 2 hits the shuttter release (whether directly or not I can't remember).
The beauty is that by adjusting one ball slightly in respect to each other, you can control exactly when the splash occurs.
:scrapheapchallengemode:
Right, you have four hours to build one and make it work! Safety Dislcaimer: Please note that the word 'ball' above refers to a 'ball bearing' and should not be tried with the trouser variety.
Hey guys thanks for all your replies. As I said when I took these earlier this week it was just me experimenting, but I've been off work today with the flu, and rather than mope around I thought I'd try again. Flippin heck it's much more difficult when there's actually something you want to achieve. So I've tried to take all comments on board, I think I've got better DOF, I've cleaned the glass after every drop, recorded them in sequence (well at least the number of dice in the vase) and hopefully got my whites more white although they were just too bright and you lost some of the motion of the water - so reverted back to a more grey colour. Have to say I just did these with pot luck and continuous shoot mode, no ball bearings and other contraptions here - is that how people used to take photos like that then? All of these have been tweaked in PSP, clarify and histogram altered, I'm quite pleased with the result. Anywhere here's the fruit of this afternoons attempt.
I'm affraid the small size doesn't do it justice but a bigger one can be found here: here
Also while I was at it, I put an extension tube on, and the result are some furry dice
>> Edited by rhubarb on Thursday 23 February 22:09
I'm affraid the small size doesn't do it justice but a bigger one can be found here: here
Also while I was at it, I put an extension tube on, and the result are some furry dice
>> Edited by rhubarb on Thursday 23 February 22:09
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