I didn't want to do a typical water shot, ie water droplet or river/waterfall and I need to practice my set-up shots.
So I decided to go with ice because it was in ready supply, consisted of water and most especially if captured right it can be very beautiful.
I purposefully went for a dark blue background with varying tones to emulate the changing nature of water. The focus was tough for me, I couldn't get a nice, sharp, even focus throughout. Grr.
I decided on *melting* ice to hopefully appease those who believe water can only be water in its liquid form - thus the melted ice (water) along the base.
I'm sure this could've been captured better by others but I am very pleased with the result, we will soon see if anyone else agrees though even if they don't, I'm happy.
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Hi LucidLotus,
Marvelous idea with ice. What one can do with a little imagination very nice. A little more DOF would have brought you a more balanced focus though the entire photo. Seems to be a touch under exposed but then again you might have blown out the top cubes a tuff call there. Nice use of lighting. Try using a card board box about 24 to 36" away using a slave and bounce the flash off the inside of the box. The box would soften the light and give you a nice soft balance thro-out the photo including the bottom. You would have to experiment with the flash settings but I think you would be pleasently suprized. You may even get a little twinkle from a few of the cubes. Over all a very nice job of a not so easy subject. Cubes from the freezer tend to have air bubbles and freeze in irregular patterns presenting a whole different set of problems from there buddies outdoors. Well done.
In your comments, you say that getting a nice, sharp, even focus was difficult. I think that the reason for this was that you used f2.0, one of the widest stops possible.
If you had used a narrower stop, like f5.6 or so, more of the shot would have been in clearer focus. What I do when I absolutely need the shot to be in focus is to use my narrowest stop (f9.5). But experience tells me that for a 5-10 cm object f5.6 is enough. You need to experiment.
When I first saw the thumbnail, I thought these were birds flying out of the water but now when I see the full image and I can see that they are, in fact, ice cubes. Very imaginative!
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