WOW, Blue and a new PB!! Many thanks for all your comments and votes.
Technicals: Nikon speedlights – 1 in a softbox above, 1 with a yellow gel behind and below fired at the wall, 1 with a grid and snoot below right aimed at the lime.
Shot glass was hot glued onto a sheet of Perspex, which was taped to my son’s model car. The lime is held on place on a wire-V hotglued onto a pane of glass. Damp salt sticks to glass to a point, but I still had to have the glass at an angle so it didn’t slip down, which is why the shot glass is so close to the edge and the f stop small to make sure everything was sharp. Pre focused, then switched off the focusing.
Triggered by taping down a cable release past is focus point, so as soon as it was touched it tripped the camera. Clamped a rolling pin to the table, put the cable release next to it, rolled the car against it, and when it hit, it jolted the tequila up out of the glass and fired the flashes – perfect timing every time.
This was a massive learning curve for me. I could see the image clearly in my mind, but had no clue how to execute it.
Day 1: I originally was making a real mess trying to time everything in the dark and triggering my flash manually. Gave up!
Day 2: It suddenly dawned on me that I could trigger the shot splash using my cable release when I slid the Perspex sheet against it. But still couldn’t get the timing of the salt and lime right. I had some thick wire taped to the end of the Perspex out of the picture with the lime stuck on it and a pile of salt on another so when it struck the cable release it fell into place. Gave up on that idea.
I finally got the idea to hot glue a wire-V onto a pane of glass and stick the lime wedge on it. The salt was damp so stuck to the glass. Once I had figured it out, I got all sorts of wonderful tequila shapes, but felt this looked the most like a tongue. Incidentally, if you don’t tape the cable release, it causes a tiny delay, so you get some cool dancing tequila shapes next to the glass. (and most important, a polarizing filter to minimize the reflections)
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Congrats on the ribbon and pb. More importantly, thank you for the detailed description. I love knowing how people performed these crazy shots and yours was very well detailed. Thanks and good job.
on the technical side of this, the cropping needs some rotation still, it's just a smidge leaning still. I think the only other thing that I'd like to see done just a bit differently is that the shotglass seems *very* close to the edge of the table, which makes the background feel a bit overwhelming/close.
Lick of Salt, Tequila, Lime
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