Monthly Archives: April 2013

Paint Splash Triptych

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Walking into any contemporary art store, one is sure to find art pieces made up of either a single image cropped onto multiple canvases, or a series of images each mounted on a separate canvas. My personal favourite is the latter, as usually any one of the images can stand on its own, however when put together most often than not they tell a compelling story.

I can’t truthfully say that I had this in mind when I was experimenting with my paint splash project earlier in April. However once I started editing my images, I came up with the idea of creating a Triptych, depicting the fate of the paint drop as it hits the ground. Here are the 3 images in sequence – anyone think they would make for a good art piece on my wall?

triptych1a

Paint splash2 - 1920c

triptych3

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Outdoor Portrait Photography

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Of all the different types of photography I’ve tried, the one I find very challenging is portrait photography – especially when working outdoors where the elements of nature are always unpredictable. As they say however, practice makes perfect, so yesterday I went out for another round.

Admittedly though, this was not solely my idea.To my pleasant surprise it was Daria who came up with the initiative, at the same time volunteering herself as my model. Definitely an interesting turn of events, as she is usually simply an observer, occasionally nagging me about how long it takes me to take a single shot! Needless to say I didn’t hesitate a second, so just before sunset we left the house on a quest to find a decent photo location. Our short drive brought us to an abandoned hotel in the middle of Nicosia, which after closing due to financial problems a good decade ago, it has been left in a state of decomposition – a perfect location for a photo shoot!

I’ve been recently reading  about single light portraits and the dramatic effect they can produce. Since I only own a single speedlight, one can understand my interest in this technique! The picture below is one of the 2-3 decent pictures I managed to take during our 30-minute on-location shoot. For this shot, the flash gun was mounted off-camera on a tripod, elevated high up and aimed downwards towards Daria. Through the magic settings of camera and flash exposure, I managed to fully control both the ambient light and the light output of the flash gun. The resulting picture was then converted into B&W in Adobe Lightroom 4, with a few adjustments made to contrast and clarity.

Daria Outdoor Portrait - 1920cTaken with my Canon 60D, Canon 24-70mm F2.8L lens, at ISO 160, F8.0, 1/200 sec. Flash output was set to 1/2.

Paint Splash

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What better way to start the weekend than planning a photo shoot! This past Friday I left work and headed to do a bit of shopping in preparation for a mini project I’ve been wanting to do for some time now. The shopping list included a small bottle of red water-based paint, two glossy white ceramic tiles and an eye dropper. The idea was to photograph at high speed, a paint drop as it rebounds off the ground (or in this case one of the ceramic tiles).

The setup was fairly simple. I set the first tile flat on a coffee table, then placed the second tile perpendicular to it, essentially creating a mini studio. I then watered down my paint, squeezed some into my eyedropper, and then fixed the eyedropper vertically above the flat tile onto one of my tripods. I then fixed my speedlight flash near the eyedropper facing down, so that the light would rebound off the standing tile. Here is a photo taken with my cell phone of the entire setup (link).

With a towel standing by, I then started squeezing drop after drop, while triggering my camera with my wireless remote. It took a bit of luck and coordination, but boy was I happy when I managed to get this beautiful red crown!

Taken with my Canon 60D and Canon 100mm F2.8 macro lens, at ISO 200, F16, 1/200th of a sec. Flash set to manual at 1/16th of its power output.

Paint splash2 - 1920c

Protaras Pier

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March was a relatively short month work-wise, as we were lucky to have 3 back to back national holidays fall on Mondays. Unfortunately however, the first 2 of those long weekends were spent by most people (including myself) at home, glued to our TV-sets, following minute by minute updates of the events that have taken our economy back a good 40 or so years. Unable to see a minute more of yet another incompetent politician being interviewed on TV, I decided to get out of town this past weekend and seek an outlet from this really depressing environment.

On Sunday afternoon, I found myself gear in hand walking down the Sunrise beach boardwalk in Protaras. To my excitement I saw this pier extending into the sea, and without a second thought I started setting up my tripod to take the shot. The outcome is the following image, the result of a 4 minute and 10 second exposure! Luckily, the people on the pier were not standing still so they were not recorded as part of the image. On the downside, the heavy dust in the atmosphere at sunset completely masked any movement of the clouds.

Shot with my tripod mounted Canon 60D, Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens, at ISO 100, F16, 250 secs. For this shot I mounted both my circular polariser and ND 3.0 lens to effectively get a 12-stop reduction in my shutter speed.

Protaras Pier - 1920c