Thanks for all the kind comments from everyone. I wanted to explain a little more how this was done. As I said in the details, I saw a similar shot done in a book I was reading and thought it was a cool shot. So when this challenge came about, I knew I had to give it a try.
I first setup on of my stobe lights 90 degrees to the left of the purple plate, then my second strobe is about 15 degrees behind and to the right. Both lights are shooting through the umbrella to diffuse the light. Positioned my purple plate on a table and moved my camera in with the tripod and set it in macro mode. I manually focused where I wanted the drop to be and proceeded to start dropping my Nestle Liquid Vanilla Milkshake onto the plate. I was just trying to capture a single drop and it wasn't getting the crown I wanted. So I just kept dropping over and over and noticed as the puddle grew, my splashes became more crowned. I adjust light brightness and shutter speed until I got what appeared to be a good freeze frame. I then kept whiping the plate and making a new puddle and dropping and trying to time it just as the splash occured.
After about 100 tries I got the crown I wanted. I opened it in PS and realized that it was underlit and there was a slight motion blur (the underlit part I found out the next day was due to me still having my polarizing filter on the camera). I proceeded to adjust my levels, curves, sharpness and hues until I got the coloring I liked. I ran it through Neatimage to remove the sparkle pattern in the plate and then resized it and put a border on it. There was no cropping done to this image, it is as it was from the camera.
Again thanks for all the great votes and comments,
-danny
I must be dense ;) but what liquid did you have in the plate into which you were dropping the milkshake? I assume it wasn't more milkshake else the purple plate wouldn't have showed through?
It was infact a puddle of milkshake! Physics makes the crown when a drop falls into the puddle!
-danny
Originally posted by Kavey:
I must be dense ;) but what liquid did you have in the plate into which you were dropping the milkshake? I assume it wasn't more milkshake else the purple plate wouldn't have showed through?
Not a huge difference but you did clean up some noise nicely. It's STILL purple so can you explain why? Is it the plate? If so, why can't you see the milkshake puddle?
Not a huge difference but you did clean up some noise nicely. It's STILL purple so can you explain why? Is it the plate? If so, why can't you see the milkshake puddle?
The puddle is all the liquid in the crown. So as the one drop hits the puddle the physics of the impact force the liquid in the puddle up and out. This creates the whole in the middle and the ring of fluid with the crown. This happens very quickly so we rarely see this with the naked eye. The purple all around the shake is in fact a plastic purple plate that I purchased at Big Lots! :-)
Ohhhh. I get it now! Thanks. You were talking about making the puddle big so I thought there must be more than just what's in the air.
BTW, my 2-year-old neice was just in my room saying "go big lots? go big lots? peeeeeeeeeeas". She's a born shopper ;P
