Oil and water

Oil and Water G iven the quarantine due to the coronavirus, people have a lot of time at home now. One of my eBooks -- Home Photo Projects -- is perfect for photographers to be creative without going anywhere. Most of what I describe in the eBook was done in my kitchen. One of the techniques I really enjoy is photographing oil and water . . . in color. It’s fun, easy, and costs less than $5 or, possibly, nothing at all. The setup is shown on page 11. It is simply a shallow glass bowl suspended above a piece of paper on which I’ve painted several bright colors using water color paints. Alternatively to the paint, you can also use pieces of colored fabric, colorful plastic toys, colorful vegetables like cherry tomatoes, carrots, swiss chard, etc. Whatever you use won’t come into focus; these items are only there to provide color. You can see from my setup that any kind of makeshift arrangement can work. I just used two boxes of uneven heights, and then with books I leveled the glass bowl. It’s not a slick, professional setup, but it worked just fine. The important part is that the glass bowl be 2 or 3 feet away from the color background. That’s why, even with a small lens aperture, the col-

AUSTRIA & the DOLOMITES

Sept. 25 to Oct. 4, 2021

I filled the bowl with water to about a one inch depth. I then poured a little vegetable oil into the water and, because the two liquids are immiscible, the oil floats on the surface of the water and forms circular clusters.

The technique

Because I wish to move the camera over the surface of the oil and water to find various compositions, I don’t use a tripod. It’s too inhibiting. Therefore, I have to use a flash because that provides enough illumination for a small lens aperture. This is macro photography and, by definition, depth of field is very shallow. The surface of the liquids presents a single flat plane where essentially depth of field

isn’t relevant, but the challenge is keeping the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the digital sensor) parallel with the surface of the liquid. This is a bit t tricky. If the camera is oblique to the surface, even a little, depth of field suffers and portions of the image won’t be sharp.

Therefore, I set up a portable flash unit so the light is directed at the colorful background. The flash unit can be triggered remotely by various types of wireless devices.

For the exposure, I set the flash to eTTL (or iTTL for Nikon users), the camera is set to manual exposure mode, the shutter speed is the sync speed (1/200 or 1/250). I use f/32 for the lens aperture to guarantee the images are sharp from edge to edge. Using these settings, your exposures should be either right-on or very close to being correct. If they need to be tweaked, use the flash exposure compensation feature built into the flash to make adjustments in 1/3 f/stop increments.

All of the pictures in this article were taken with a 50mm macro lens. You could also use a 100mm macro, a 180mm maco, or any meThe most important thing to pay attention to, once you find a composition you like, is to make the back of the camera as parallel as possible to the plane of the water and oil.

Once you’ve found compositions you like, take a utensil and stir the mixture of liquids a little. This will create new designs for you to shoot.

For a variation on a theme, point the flash from beneath the liquids straight up toward the camera. This produces dramatic and contrasty backlight devoid of color but quite interesting. The space-like abstract on the previous page shows you what you’ll get. You’ll have to tweak the exposure and adjust the position of the flash until you like what you see. §