A Creechure’s PhotoBlog

This shoot was probably one of the most enjoyable I have done in awhile.  I always find photographing liquids extremely challenging and the difficulties associated with this type of photography is what keeps drawing me to it.  I had the concept a few months ago to photograph a product of some sort on a column of water.  There were a number of problems with such a concept and so I thought over several days on how to accomplish it.  In the end, I assembled a type of rig that would allow me to sit and take pictures for approximately a minute before I would have to reset.

This is what I came up with.  As you can see, I have a large bucket that is suspended several feet above ground by a boom an a few cables.  A hose is used to fill the top bucket with water.  The product is dangling below the bucket, suspended by fishing line , which is threaded through an eye screw hotglued to its base.  Below the product is another large bucket, which was used to catch the water falling to the ground.

Originally, I drilled a quarter size hole in the bottom of the top bucket.  I used a wine cork, wrapped in duct tape to plug the hole.  Again, I used an eye screw and drilled it into the cork and threaded some string through the eye screw so that I could yank the cork from a distance.

After some preliminary shots, I realized the flow of the water coming from the bucket wasn’t as I had imagined. I widened the hole with a sawzaw so that I could get a larger diameter of water to fall, however that lent the wine cork as useless.  Luckily, I had an assistant who was willing to plug the hole with his hand for a couple hours.

After more shots, I started to see that the water inside the bucket was whirlpooling inside the bucket and was not falling straight down and instead was somehow defying gravity, flying out at 45 degree angle to the ground, missing the product entirely.  To solve this, I placed a coffee container inside the bucket and hoped that this would act as a baffle, diverting the water straight down.  It seemed to work for the most part.

Lighting was a definite issue.  I found that my AB’s don’t have a fast enough flash duration to stop liquids to my liking.  I do however prefer to use them with my studio and product work because of the modeling lights and compatiblity with my softboxes.  For this reason, I took a couple hours just shooting the product with my AB’s without any water added to the system.  There was nothing preventing the bottle from spinning and I needed good source pictures of the front of the bottle.  After I got the pictures I needed, I switched out the AB’s for my speedlights and added the water to the system.  I have one backlighting the subject which is sitting on a cooler behind the product.  I also have two flanking the product on either side and then white pieces of foam core help to highlight the water.

Post processing honestly wasn’t too difficult.  I took over 250 pictures in a 4.5 hours span, so I had a lot to pull from when editing.  Here are the 3 main pictures used to create the final image.

And here is an animation I created of the process.

And here are a couple other pics from the shoot.