As a Photographer, you can take pictures of just about anything. You can walk around and take pictures of things you see. You can capture people doing what they do. You can collect millions of images now that digital makes it so easy to just shoot everything, from every angle, and sort through the resulting collections deciding which are worthy of sharing.
But the real challenge to photography is to create something specifically to capture and share. To re-create something that is normally bland or perhaps hard to capture, and make it uniquely your own. Such is the case with drips and drops. Tiny drops of fluid dropped into another fluid to make interesting and colourful splashes. Of itself, a difficult process to get just right, but when the results are there, it’s exciting to see the wild variations of something that nature does all around us regularly, but we never really get to slow down and capture.
Capturing drops ‘in the wild’ is difficult because you’re likely to get wet doing so. And water hitting water tends to be nothing but clear and bland. When you can create your own drop tank and incorporate different liquids, colours and specifically crafted lighting combinations, it becomes FAR more interesting. This process will be the theme of my first online Photography instruction series. Through the days ahead, I’ll be recording small videos of the process that I use to create these tiny and amazing art works. And when I’m done, I’ll be sharing the process with you in hopes that you might be inspired to create the same way. And hopefully come up with enhancements to what I’m doing, and share your results with me and the world.
This little gallery is a sample of the results from my tests tonight with what will be the final setup that I will be showing you. These are straight out of camera, cropped and with a slight nudge in saturation. The images are from the medium JPG files created by my camera, and not from the RAW files. Through the week, as I build the tutorials, I’ll show some final edits created from the RAW files, and some of those will end up in the store for sale in print form. I’m quite excited to push forward with this little creative experiment, and hope that you’ll not only follow along, but learn and create something uniquely yours as a result.
The main point – don’t restrict yourself to what happens around you – but MAKE something happen and capture that!
Cheers!
njw
