I am very disappointed to say that the shoot was a waste of time and that out of the 200+ photographs, not one was good. Hence the reason I will not be showing any of the photographs on this website. My first trouble came with lighting. I found it very difficult to to place the lights so that there wasn't any reflection on the glass or on the black backdrop. The second problem, was the fact that I only had two pairs of hands. I couldn't physically squirt two colours into the tank at once and take the picture at the same time. And yes I did try using the timer function but I kept missing the time slot, so that was unsuccessful. The third problem was that, originally, my shutter speed was too low, so the images were coming out blurry, so I increased the shutter speed and then the images became too dark. Finally the last and most impactful problem of them all, was the focus of the camera. The focus would change depending on the spot that I squirted the paint in and it was difficult to keep this consistent. When I got it perfect for one photograph the next one would be out-of focus as I had moved the position from which I dropped the paint into the tank.

 

Out of the 200+ photographs that I took about 10 of them were in focus. The most annoying thing was that when I viewed them on the camera they seemed fine but when I got home and checked them I realized that they were completely useless. There was nothing wrong with the composition, lighting and colour, they were just ALL out of focus....

 

I decided to redo the shoot, this time with a little help from my teacher. Unfortunately I had no success again. However I did work out why. The reason the photographs were too blurry in the first shoot was because the aperture was too low. So the second time round I used an aperture of around 9.6 which gave a better focus. However we were still stuck with the issue of the photographs being too dark. I had to keep the shutter speed high and the aperture was as wide as we could get it. I also got out two soft boxes and there still wasn't enough light. Finally I tried increasing the ISO (as a last resort) but the photographs just came out too grainy. So I decided that it might be a better idea to use a better camera and lens...

 

A week later I attempted the shoot for the third time and I am extremely happy to say that it was a success! I used a 'Canon 60D and a Canon 'EF 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS USM Lens' that belonged to my teacher. I used the same setup as before but was still having trouble with the lighting so I had to up the ISO meaning that some photographs appear a bit grainy, but it was the best that I could do with the equipment that I had.