Paper on edge

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:

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Paper on edge

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