For something completely different, I took one evening to have a bit of fun with some product photography.
The idea was to get a mug free floating with a liquid coming out of it.
So the first was to get a clean backdrop. I have some white and black foam boards. Black would do nicely for this, here’s an out of focus picture I probably took by accident when I started to frame up.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28 - 1/13 Sec - F5.0 - ISO 3200
After I’ve got my black background I needed to get everything in focus and in the right lighting.
Too fast of a shutter speed? You get half the image in darkness.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70 - 1/800 Sec - F5.0 - ISO 100
Eventually I would figure out about where I needed to hold my hand, I took some pictures of the mug with me holding it in different areas so I could cut and paste to get my hand out of the shot. Then I needed the liquid.
I had picked a nice green mug, so for a different color that would stand out I mixed some water, milk and corn starch together with red food coloring.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70 - 1/250 Sec - F5.0 - ISO 100
Then it was just a matter of spilling it, without making too big of a mess.
I put a plastic tub on the table where I was doing this, tried my best to cover up the camera equipment. And got to shooting.
There was a lot of back and forth motions so the liquid would be in motion already by the time I made the spill. In my other hand had the trigger release for the camera.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70 - 1/800 Sec - F5.0 - ISO 100
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70 - 1/800 Sec - F5.0 - ISO 100
Eventually I had done this enough times to think I had what I needed. It was just a few hours of photoshop left to do. Cutting and clipping the liquid spills, getting the mug in the right spot. Color tweaking so the liquid was more red and not pink.
Of course logically it doesn’t make sense, there’s no way that much liquid could come out from so many different angles. But damn it looks cool.
Sometimes you get a feeling of what would be cool to do. And though you’ve never done it you just work on it until you get what you’re looking for.