Thursday, October 8th, 2026 at 10:24pm
While I had things setup to take photos of paper strips on edge I also did a quick dabble with layering sheets of paper:
While this did give some interesting results, they were not as interesting as what I got from the edges. I will still add it to my list of ideas and I did take enough images for a gallery, but I doubt it is something I would try again.
I saw one video about this technique:
Tagged with: photography
Wednesday, October 7th, 2026 at 10:37pm
In my quest to work through my list of photo ideas I decided to cross of one that required minimal setup and equipment, abstract images of paper, specifically when placed on edge and lit from below.
This is a similar setup to what I used for oil in water, but on the glass shelf I placed strategically shaped strips of paper:
Another difference is that instead of firing a single flash down onto coloured objects, I am using two flashes each with a different coloured gel. The colour of the gels, the locations of the flashes and the orentiation of the paper provide a lot of variety, though not at much as the very random soap bubbles.
In my first dabble I cut up strips of paper myself but it was a pain to get them exactly the same, so I picked up some paper for an impact receipt printer (known as Bond Roll). As well as being exactly the same width, these also come pre-curved.
Stapling sections together into loops lead to one style of shape:
Folds can be added:
Simple strips can be placed:
One effect that surprised me was whether I set the focus on the near (to the camera) edge of the paper or on the far (against the glass) edge of the paper. When near you get a dark line along the edge and the “glow” effect is generally towards the inside of the shape, while when far there is no dark line and the effect is outside of the shape.
A downside of focusing on the far side meant that any dust on the glass would then be in focus, so those images ended up needing a lot of spot removal.
Across four different sessions I took around a thousand images, ending up with my final selection of twenty six: Paper on edge
Videos for this approach:
Tagged with: photography
Thursday, October 1st, 2026 at 05:54pm
The latest item to cross off my list has been to photograph soap bubbles, specifically the patterns and colours that form on their surface. This has been fairly tricky to work out, but I ended up with a setup that worked for me.
With so much variance in the results I ended up with a lot of images and struggled to limit my final selection, so here is a gallery with sixty images: Soap bubbles
This was the setup on my kitchen bench:
The progression of a bubble is reasonably predictable:
In my final session playing with this technique I took over two thousand images, these were culled to eight hundred, and then I narrowed them down to the sixty. All the images have a boost to the exposure and clarity, as well as being cropped and rotated in some way.
The videos I found useful for this technique:
Tagged with: photography
Monday, September 21st, 2026 at 04:07pm
When I posted about looking through my list and picking lightbulb on a tablet as the next thing to work on and important qualifier was having all the parts. I have actually gone through the entire list of ideas and created a list of things that I need to get before I could start.
I did try oil and water with a clear baking dish balanced on top of some small boxes, but this was both too precarious and I quickly found that I needed a better container that had less imperfections and/or lettering.
To have a better platform I wanted a piece of glass, but where is a convenient place to get a small piece of tempered glass? A glass shelf and there is an IKEA not that far away where I picked up an UTRUSTA shelf.
For the container I had gotten some interesting results from a round Pyrex jug, but I could tell that for the nice smooth results I needed something larger and with square sides. I normally don’t like using Amazon, but that was where I found some acrylic trays, these came in a number of sizes and are advertised as for organising makeup in a drawer.
This was my final setup:
From the bottom up we have:
Initially I tried using my tablet as the source of coloured/patterned light, but it just wasn’t bright enough. I had to raise the ISO much higher than I wanted, a larger tablet might give better results. I then tried a small continuous LED light but that also didn’t give enough light. The flash is what allowed me to keep the camera at ISO 100.
Over the course of three sessions I took well over two thousand images, after an initial purge that is down to just under a thousand, from that I have a selection of thirty two in a Flickr album: Oil and water
The technique I was using at the end was:
As the oil drops are moving slowly you get more variance from shifting around the objects under the shelf. The last dozen or so images in my album are the same drops but with different objects, cropping and rotation, eg these:
The mono one is just the grey desk surface, the red one is the shiny back cover of the pencil box, the blue/orange/grey is overlappting tissue paper and the more striped one is the pencils.
One disadvantage of this technique is that as soon as dust starts to settle on the water or you have added too much oil your must reset. Empty the tray and thoroughly clean it, then fill it back up with clean water.
Another disadvantage of this technique is that very quickly after the drops touch will they combine, which you can catch:
To avoid both of these issues you can add a drop of dishwashing liquid which will lower the surface tension, clearing away the dust (as is seen in the Pepper and Water Science Trick – YouTube) and will also make the oil drops stay separate.
You can them get the clusters of small drops, but I didn’t like that you also have a dark ring around each drop:
Stirring up the oil and water can introduce air bubbles, and in a deeper container can give interesting effects with large globs of oil on the surface and tiny bubbles and drops below:
Post processing these images can be tedious, no matter how clean you have it, there was always specs or small drops that I didn’t want. For the ones where I wanted it smooth all over, I used the spot removal tool over everything. For others where there was a lot of activity I would spot remove within the large drops, but then leave the background mostly untouched.
Videos I found useful for this technique:
Tagged with: photography
Sunday, September 20th, 2026 at 04:16pm
While building and initial playing around with my DIY pixelstick was fun, I was stalled a bit because the next step was to go out and try it, but I needed to work out some locations and find some other people to assist. So I looked through my list and picked one that didn’t need much setup and I already had all the parts: clear object on tablet.
I had seen this around with people using clear plastic or glass objects lit from below by an image on a tablet. I don’t have any glass figures or ornaments, but many people were using lightbulbs, so last time I was at Bunnings I picked up a globe that I thought would be suitable.
The bulb had to be clear, it is a smaller size so there is less empty space within, the screw base was more interesting than a bayonet base, and I liked the long thin LED elements:
To illuminate the bulb I needed some colourful patterns. The guides I had seen online suggested stock images or free patterns, but I decided to use my own images. I found about 20 images I thought would be suitable, ones with lines or shapes, and strong patterns or bold colours, and started to experiment.
The setup is fairly simple, a small table with black cloth behind, my 8″ tablet with the bulb on top, camera on tripod in front:
The tablet is on another small box to raise it up a bit so the camera was at a more comfortable height, but that folded piece of white paper? That is there to bounce a bit of light back onto just the top of the screw threads, to complete their shape.
My first session of experimenting gave promising results. I had the table in different orientations, I changed the angle of the camera to the tablet, I rotated the bulb on the tablet, I zoomed in and out of the image to change its position in the bulb to get different effects.
In that behind the scenes shot above I was still using my regular 24-105 lens, but I later switched to my 100mm macro lens which gave a clearer result that was easier to focus. The final images were taken at f/16 ISO100 for (most at) 10 seconds, so I am glad I picked up a bluetooth remote so I could move away from the setup during the exposure?
Why stay away? The lightbulb is glass and metal sitting on the glass front of the tablet, this is very slippery and any slight movement from the floor would cause the bulb to shift. Initially I had a small piece of blutack behind the threads, but you could see that in the final shot, so I 3d printed a little black arm that came out from behind the tablet and stuck to the back of the threads with blutack, even then the bulb would slide around a little bit.
All of this led to the second session where I knew the setup that I wanted so I worked my way through all of my chosen images on the tablet. Once I had those images in Lightroom I selected the best dozen and then got to work tweaking their sliders (all of them got a lot of clarity) and a decent amount of spot removal
Those dozen images are in my Lightbulb on a tablet album. The description of each image has a link to the image that was being displayed on the tablet. I couldn’t decide between two images that used Sockets, so I included them both.
This also means that this item is completed, I have crossed it off the list.
Some videos I found useful for this were:
Tagged with: photography
