Well that was a crazy shoot. 4 Models cancelled on me with in 24hours of the shoot so we had to improvise, the last one just hours before the shoot. Tobias (from g+ not FB) and I had talked about doing a triggertrap shoot in the past, so even with a lack of models we would test out the possibilities. We both threw stuff together and meet at the studio for and evening of experimental studio techniques.

FAIL/WIN

Well some how the BANG feature of the Triggertrap wouldn’t work fast enough for us to catch popping balloons. The audio signal worked, it fired the camera but always way to late no matter how we set it up. They work with the audio triggering just not at high enough speed to do what we wanted.  So after we have poped all my children’s balloons we moved on.

Oil and water just don’t mix, back in may childhood things like lava lamps were the peak of fashion. Sci Fi films would project oil and water images on a wall for some type of trippy effect. Using a large bowl of lukewarm water we let drops of olive oil float around on the water and lit it all up from underneath (through the glass table and glass-bowl. We knew straight away there was potential there but it needed to be worked on. It wasn’t until we added some water colour paint and a drop of dish washing liquid to the mix that we reached a very cool 60’s LSD look. Mini spiral arm galaxies formed before our eyes and we go to play god for a few seconds, mixing a few extra drops of colour to the slowly swirling cosmic mix.

While the glass table was set up with a 200ws Bowens flash underneath I jumped at the chance to shot some thin slices of kiwi fruit and broken eggs from above. Using the low powered flash to light trough the structure of the kiwi fruit is something I have wanted to do for years but just never did. It may not be any thing new and crazy but its another tick beside something simple I always wanted to do but just never got around to.

Our improvised night of shooting ended with dropping banana into a bowl of milk. Although Tobias wasn’t keen on using a banana I figured that if it was good enough for Andy Warhol it was good enough for us. Although this was probably the most fun we had during the night it was defiantly the most mess and took for ever to clean it all up.

Footnote Lighting etc

Thanks Tobias it was cool doing something different to shooting models shame we couldn’t get the audio signals working how we planed but other then that I think the night was a general success. I koow people want to see the lighting diagrams from the shoots but most of the photos were with a set up that cant be depicted in a 2d diagram. We photographed from either 45° angel or directly above the table pointing down, the flash was on a mini tripod pointing up through the bottom of the glass table. Our objects were placed on the table directly above the flash.

side-view with the flash pointing up through a glass table

The milk splashes were simply lite with 2 strip lights on the sides. We placed the glass bowl of milk on a large mirror and used a cheap Made in china collapse-able background that i picked up at Photokina about 7 years ago. Unfortunate the templates at sylights don’t match the look 100% but i hope you get the basic idea based on my description.

Front view

Translate this page using google translate