This weeks photo challenge topic was “close up”. I decided to try photographing ink dispersion in water. It took a few attempts over a couple of days to get the setup and camera settings right, but the result pretty good. A fun technique, and one I will revisit.

I learned a lot from this photo shoot, so in the interests of sharing…


Equipment

You shouldn’t need to purchase any unique equipment for this, except for some food dye, which you may already have in the kitchen.

Camera Settings

Depth of field is the primary challenge. Depending on your lens you going to have a pretty thin DoF. In my case, I started shooting at 60mm, from about 8 inches, which even at f22 resulted in a 0.216" DoF. Far too thin. I ended up using a longer range lens at 145mm, 3 feet away, at f22, with a 0.894" DoF – about half the diameter of the glass, but generally enough for most of the ink dispersion. Your DoF Calculator will take the guess work out of camera settings.

Lighting

The goal here is to overexpose the white background, and to reflect the light off the background through the glass to the camera. That means you want lighting on the background not the glass.

Setup: The First Try

For my first attempts I had the idea of using my monitor as a light source, and as the white background. This seemed to be going pretty well. Unfortunately even though I checked the images periodically through the process, the moire artifacts on the glass were pretty harsh once viewed from the computer.

That and the fact that the water and glass magnified the monitor pixels put this great idea in the lessons learned bucket. I did try putting some tissue over the monitor to reduce the pixel effect, and it worked but reduced the light source too much.

Setup: Second Time Lucky

In the end I botched together a ‘light box’, surrounding the glass with a box of white construction paper, in an attempt to maximize the light from the single flash I had.

Things to know

Next Time

I’ll probably revisit the monitor as a light source idea. Putting paper over the monitor will remove the pixel effect. Supplement with a flash, and it should form a really nice white background.

The End Result

Some post processing was needed. Removing dust particles, and making the background lighting even, and white mostly.