Dancing Paint
One of my favorite photos is this image, a capture of a few drops of paint. While a few drops of paint may not sound like they would be an interesting subject, but when you apply a little bit of noise to the mix things can start to get pretty interesting rather quickly. This started as something that I had seen on the internet a few times and had wanted to try.
The concept of the shot is relatively simple: you stretch a balloon tightly over a speaker, and then place a few drops of colored paint onto the balloon. When you turn the music on the balloon will start to vibrate, and it is these vibrations that are going to cause the paint to “dance” up off the surface of the balloon. All of this is going to happen in a very short period of time, and I found that it was pretty difficult to actually capture it.
After setting up the speaker and the balloon, the first thing to do what to set up the lights. The lights are what makes this shot possible, as the light from the flashes is what freezes the motion of the paint. I put the flashes in manual mode, and zoomed in to their tightest setting, 105mm because my subject is really small. One flash was placed on each side of the speaker and above it. The flashes were set at 1/8th power and I took a couple of test shots. With my camera set at ISO 100, my shutter speed at 1/200th of a second, and an aperture of f/16 I found that my histogram showed that I had the correct exposure.
Why did I choose some of these settings? Lets start with a few basic concepts. With flash photography, when you are using the flash as you main source of light the exposure is going to be controlled by your aperture and your ISO. Your shutter speed is really going to be irrelevant in a shot like this. The duration of the flash going off is probably around 1/12,000 of a second. So if your shutter speed is 1/200th of a second or 1 whole second the camera is still going to see the same amount of flash. The exposure on our subject will not change. What WILL change with the shutter speed is how much of the ambient light that is in the room will be recorded. At my settings of ISO 100, F/16 and 1/200th of a second when I take a picture in this room it is all black – there is not enough ambient light for an exposure at these settings. If you really want to get a handle on using off camera flash I highly recommend learning to light with Strobist. Go through the Lighting 101 and Lighting 102 sections, then head over to my favorite photo sharing site, Flickr and join the Strobist group.
Ok, so lets get back to choosing some settings. This is a macro shot, so I know that the depth of field is going to be pretty narrow, so I chose an aperture of F/16 to get a depth of field that is wide enough to get all of the paint sharply in focus. We already know that 1/200 of a second was chosen as a fast speed that will kill the ambient light, so that the rest of the image is black. Remember, the shutter speed is not going to freeze the paint, the flash does that job for us! Remember dancing in a night club with a strobe light, how people seemed to move? Same concept, only no one should be spilling a drink all over your clothes with this.
Now that we have our camera set up for the image we want to create, we need to set the lights up to expose the paint. One light on each side gives me even lighting throughout the scene. Simple pick a power setting on the flash and take a picture and use your histogram to determine if the light is correct. If the light is too bright you have 2 options – dial down the flash power, or move the flash a little further away from the subject. If the light is too dark what do you do? Either power the flash up a bit, or move the flash in closer to the subject. It really is that simple!
At this point you simply turn on the music and snap away. It WILL take several tries to get something, but don’t give up, it can be done. The image I ended up really made me happy. You can see how the yellow and blue colors mixed together as they danced and created a line of green right down the middle. The paint almost looks like molten plastic, and I think that the specular highlights really help it pop. I definitely want to try this again, using a sound trigger to trigger the flash to try and make it easier to get the right timing. Adding a few more colors to the mix sure might make this a bit more interesting as well.
11 Comments
Looking forward to reading more. Great article post.Thanks Again. Really Cool.
What kind of paint do you need to make this happen ?
I just used plain old crayola craft paint, nothing special at all. I would take a toothpick and stick it in the paint, and then just let a drip drop onto the balloon.
Ok , thanks ! But what did you use as a surface or did you use a black balloon ?
You are welcome Yuri! I used a black balloon, I bought a pack of them at a party supply store.
And what kind of speaker did you use?
Would a computer speaker work?
Yes, that is exactly what I used.
Ok, thank you!
just wondering whether this would work for my art. i use hardboard panels as my canvasses and i don’t think i can get the resonating vibrations to penetrate through my board. any ideas?
That is an interesting question! How thick is the hardboard? I used rubber balloon and the paint would literally fly everywhere, so I suspect that if there is a bit of flex to your board that you might be able to get some paint movement. It would certainly make for an interesting experiment!