Scott
Servante AS Photography
 |  |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |
The setup was quite difficult, more so than I expected. This is due to the fact that I had to get the shots from directly above the glass dish. As the light box was A3 size this meant extending the tripod to full length if I wanted to get the correct composition. Once the tripod and camera were setup I encountered a problem. The camera being so high up, I couldn't zoom right into the fluid contained in the dish, as my lens only has a zoom of 18-55mm. Fortunately for me however, the photography department is lucky enough to have a lens that that has a zoom of 55-250mm. This meant that I was able to get close up photographs without changing the setup. In terms of camera settings I decided to use a shutter speed of about 1/50, as I didn't want a shutter speed that was so high that the images came out too dark or a shutter speed so low that the images came out too bright. Obviously, the use of the tripod made using a slow shutter speed more viable as the camera could be kept still when taking photographs.
This was one of the most frustrating shoots that I have done so far. I found it so difficult to get the right composition and colours present. As mentioned by the photographer he took hundreds of photographs and once I started shooting I understood why.
I encountered a problem right from the beginning of shooting. The light box that I was using had a warm light rather than a nice flat white light that you would get from and LED bulb. This caused problems as the blues and greens were not showing up in the photographs properly, so I was limited to mostly red and black. To fix the problem I tried changing the contrast, saturation and the colour tone, in post production. Unfortunately, the colour tone was the only one that made a difference but it was too small to have a significant effect on the photographs. I also tried adding oil to the water to see if that made a difference. I did get some bubbles in the liquid though, but this didn't help with the colour problem. Then I realized that the problem was not the light but rather the medium that I was using to house the inks. When placing the inks in the water they were dispersing very quickly, which meant that the colours weren't as vibrant. So I found a solution; use the oil as a medium for the inks! As oil is less dense than water the inks don't disperse as easily and so are more concentrated which makes them more visible in the photographs. I plan to edit some of the best ones using Photoshop. The results will be placed down below.
