Learning

Much of my time away from teaching has been spent learning new techniques and how to do my usual imaging tasks better, smarter and faster. Some of the things I have been doing have taken me out of my comfort zone. I’m quite comfortable photographing a landscape. It’s kind of like breathing at this point. I still enjoy it, love it in fact, but the learning curve is starting to flatten out a bit. Working in the studio pushes me to learn new tricks. I started doing some work for a Photoshop course I’m redesigning. The first stage of this process started with water.

Splashing Water

Using a Canon 580 EX II flash and a set of pocket wizards, I was able to freeze water drops. Setting the flash to 1/16th power and bouncing it off a white backdrop froze the motion and gave good contrast.

From there I started dropping things into water.

Strawberry Splash

After several days of working with a large beer glass, I bought a 10-gallon fish tank. The lighting set up was much different for the tank. Through trial and error and a lot of zip lock bags to cover my equipment, I came up with images like this:

Splashing Peppers

I ended up with several, what I call “Kitchen Posters”. Here are a couple of samples:

Sequence Poster

Tomatoes Poster

My next project is whisky. Shoot first, drink later has always been my motto...

Bourbon Bottle