Of Water
Reflections have always been one of my favourite things to capture, but rarely one that I thought too deeply about. Often it has been a case of see a reflection, capture a reflection.
Recently I have been working on a project looking into not only capturing reflections on water but also capturing images through water. this project is still ongoing, but so far, I have found capturing reflections is not as straightforward as I thought it was. In this project, I am looking at capturing images of objects and portraits both on and through water.
On the Water
At the start of this project, I took a look through some of the reflection images I had taken in previous years, and I can’t really think of any that I took while intentionally looking for reflections. I mean as I discussed in my second blog post titled ‘What a Croc’ it was an unintentional reflection photo that really sparked my interest in photography. I have a good number of reflection photos, but it hasn’t been until this project that I really stopped to think about how to capture them, and it didn’t start so well.
It was a gloomy day like most of them are in this part of the world, and I took the kids to the park to capture some images of birds on the lake, I saw a small puddle and thought I’d try and capture a portrait of my daughter on it. It did not turn out remotely how I had envisioned it, the reflection was nothing more than a silhouette. The images I caught on the lake were also nothing special and I was starting to second guess my decision to take up this project. It took me a while to realise that it was nothing to do with the weather, but it was a user error and once I got my act together the images became stronger and closer to what I was aiming for.
Through the water
This part of the project was completely new to me although I have always wanted to do something like this. This part is a bit more technical and for the most part, I have and will be taking the images indoors. I have captured images in drops of falling water and droplets on a piece of Perspex, I want to capture both still life, portraits, and landscapes. I have started but still have a long way to go.
The hard part of this has been trying to capture a drop of water falling as timing has to be perfect. As I am trying to capture these droplets close up, I am using a macro lens meaning from top to bottom on the images is less than 2 centimetres. After a lot of frustration and input from others, I ended up capturing the drops using long exposure and a very fast flash in a dark room. How do you see a water droplet in a dark room you ask? Very sharp concentration and then total blindness for a few seconds once you set off a flash in your own face. But the outcomes are more than worth it.
I ended up running thickened water down the leaf and hoped for the best and even took some images using a multi burst of the flash.
I still have a way to go with this project but so far it is looking good, and I am happy with how the images are coming along.
