Gone Fishin'

[Loose Canon]

I decided to take the day off today (with pay) and do some fishing!

Didn’t catch anything but did have this rare sighting of a beautiful Handmade Glass Angelfish breaching swimming upstream to spawn!

[Brownbear]

Absolutely gorgeous!

[FrankMi]

Terry you are developing quite a knack for producing top-notch thought provoking images. I'd love to see your tutorial on how this is accomplished but I'm sure that it is a trade secret, much like Colonel Sanders 12 herbs and spices!

[Shadowman]

Good thing you did, nicely done. Very creative.

[Stagecoach]

Another inspiration Terry, very clever.

[dedro]

looks awesome Terry....

[Loose Canon]

Thank you everyone.

It took about 40 minutes to shoot and hours to produce!

I probably have around eight hours so far in it (set-up/shooting/production) and I am still seeing some problems I need to address!

[bnnrcn]

You are skillful Terry , super image !

[IzzieK]

How many gallons of water did you use to even accomplish this feat as amazing as this is the question! Really wow! Or did you use the hose sporadically?

[Loose Canon]

Binnur thank you for saying. I appreciate that.

Hey Izzie!

Not so many gallons as I let on! And for this one I didn't use a hose! I wanted to use a fire hose but Wifey-Poo put the big nix on that idea straight away! I had a fire company lined up too! Rats!

Frank has, in a roundabout way, wondered so maybe I'll put something out there for consideration!

[flashback]

Detailed enough to appease a fish or blown glass aficionado yet abstract enough to appease the abstractionistas. I could definitely see this hanging in a high end art gallery for Manhattan penthouses.

[Loose Canon]

Okay Mr. Miller!

I’ll be happy to share a little of what I did to get this shot and I promise to make it boring and uninformative enough such that you will never wonder again! I wouldn’t say it is going to be a full blown tutorial, but we’ll see how we go and maybe if there are any questions or I left something out that someone wants to know then just ask!

So let’s just get down with our bad selves…

I wanted the fish to look (hopefully) as if it were jumping so I simply hung it with a boom arm. The splashes were going to add the “motion” to an otherwise static scene.

The set up? Light the glass!

Starting with the glass fish. Being glass, and a combination of colored and clear glass at that, it has it’s own unique characteristics and problems. It has texture in the color and I was going to need to preserve as much of that as possible. This is the first thing I needed to find a solution for.



I couldn’t backlight it because the colors washed out and even changed, so then its on to reflective light. As you can see in the bts shots I used I lit the subject with three lights. Key light on camera left through a strip box and that shot through a diffuser. One edge of the strip box is against the diffuser. This gives a harder (although soft light) and more defined line where the box is against the diffusion panel with a nice (and rather quick) fall-off.

Notice the light pattern gradient on the diffusion panel in this shot. A defined hard line (dark to bright) where the edge of the strip box touches the diffusion panel to a gradient fall-off due to the box being angled slightly away to the diffusion panel. You can control this gradient with the angle of the box to the panel.



I placed one light overhead wearing barndoors. The other light you see that doesn’t look like a strobe is just a work light I use. It had nothing to do with lighting the scene. This overhead was to get some nice highlighting happening on top of the fish which is clear glass. The barn door helped me to zero in the highlighting and avoiding unwanted spill. I tried a grid but didn’t like it so just used a reflector and barndoor. Without that the clear glass of the fish would disappear into the background. The light at the bottom right was to get the same result, and for the same reason, on the bottom clear glass part of the fish.

Now this is highly reflective glass being reflectively lit so you really have to watch your lighting angles so you don’t get big honkin’ hot spots blowing out your subject. Family of angle stuff (angle of incidence=angle of reflection).

Took a few shots to get things tweaked, added a couple of flags where needed, and when I got things happening I took a “base” shot, which I would later base the composition on. I might add that anytime I do something like this I plan on compositing. Sometimes I don’t have to but that is usually not the case to get what I want.

About the Studio (in this case fancy name for my garage!)?

Notice the blue bucket which is full of water and the kiddie wading pool which is (I hope) going to catch the majority of the water I’m going to start throwing around! Another thing to note is that I always shoot tethered in the studio and with this type stuff I use a wireless trigger so I can be in the scene blowing stuff around and still trigger the camera. I aim the computer at the scene so I can see what the last shot did from the inside the scene. Once set up I manually focus (and then I can leave it) and be sure to shoot stopped down enough to (hopefully) get enough DoF for everything I expect to happen. Shooting at low(er) flash power (short flash duration) I then adjust ISO. I (almost) always shoot at max X-sync which for my camera is 1/200 sec. I shoot fairly wide to catch the splash, subject, and knowing I will crop in post.

Next is to start throwing water around.

The Splash!

A splash is going to consist of the liquid having differing velocities. The slower water is going to be the part of the splash that kind of hangs together. The faster stuff is going to be the smaller droplets and ricocheted droplets. So you are going to have to shoot with short duration flash to light the scene because that is what is going to stop the action. You will need a minimum t.1 duration with your lights of about 1/4000 sec. and the shorter the better. Speedlights can do this and at about 1/8 power. Forget ettl, you need to do this manually. Not a lot of studio strobes are capable of this so if you have some laying around that you want to use it probably isn’t going to happen. If you light with multiple lights all of them must be of short duration. Any light that is not, including background, fill, whatever, must all be of at or better than t.1 1/4000 sec. or you will get motion blur. Your shot is only so clean as your slowest flash duration and I like shorter than even 1/4000 sec. This shot’s slowest duration was over 1/5000 sec.



I didn’t change the lighting much to shoot the splash. If you look at the liquid and think about it you may notice where the lights are placed, same as with the glass. There will be a lot of refraction with clear liquid and the highlights will be unpredictable. What gives it the “clear” look is that the black background will also appear when the liquid is aligned to disappear into the background. What gives it the “glossy” look is the highlights going close to clip. Then everything in between looks great.

When you are shooting high gloss stuff (glass/translucent liquid/anything) you have to have the entire range from darn near blown highlights to darn near dead blacks and everything gradient in between. But (and this is very important) you have to control where those highs and lows occur. You can’t just nuke the subject and from just any angle and roll the dice! If not then no matter what it is will come out matte with not enough dynamic range to appear glossy or you’ll blow the scene which is worse!

So now we have the lighting looking good let’s toss some water around!

Just used a little plastic cup! I did several angles against the fish for the splash. I tossed it from the sides, bottom, top, back to try to get the results I was looking for. Different toss velocities (I like a slow toss). I did around 30 shots to get something to take into post.

Post-

This is a big deal. This is what takes the time, scares photographers off, but makes all the difference in the final quality of the shot. If you’ll notice in the splash shot provided there is always a ton of droplets and different reflections/refractions that need to be dealt with. I like/need a very clean upscale production. And that’s just a beginning. The product itself needs to be cleaned up and everything you did to produce this on set may need to be addressed in post. I do layer/mask work to a dead black BG and usually isolate every component of the shot. Isolation gives me the option to use components in future compositions if needed.

This is another post altogether and since there are a couple of threads going now about different editing software I’ll just say that you can’t do this in Lightroom.

The final shot-

Three studio strobes fired for the subject and splash.
Shutter @ 1/200th second.
f/16
ISO 320
FL 73mm

After rereading this I'm happy I accomplished my goal of boring and uninformative!

Shoot any questions and comments as you see fit!

[John 2]

Very clever and well worth the effort. This could well be a wall hanger for someone.

[Mark von Kanel]

man your an artist!

[Loose Canon]

Thank you John.

Mark, I have been accused of being a lot of things, but never an artist!

Thank you.

[FrankMi]

I am most duly impressed Terry, first and foremost by the final image! Although I've never done anything this complex, my goal has always been to strive for top-notch results as priority one, and you have certainly have accomplished that!

Next, I am also in awe of your well thought out planning and execution.

I am, I'm sure we all are, most appreciative of your willingness to take the time and effort to so eloquently present the steps needed to achieve the 'magic' involved. I do hope that others will take up your lead and perfect equally as mystifying feats of photographic sorcery. Thank you so very much for the explanation which I found to be truly fascinating!

[ST1]

Terry thanks you so much for your explanation of how you created the image. When I initially looked at your post I didn't reply but...my first thought was "I wonder how he did that" you have now answered that for me, it was as I suspected, Magic, well done and thanks again for the boring (not) explanation.

[Loose Canon]

Frank, Peter I really appreciate you guys stopping in here to have a peek at the fishing expedition!

Frank, I especially appreciate you (sort of) giving me the opportunity to share and maybe make a small contribution.

Not something I would ordinarily do unless (sort of) asked!

I have soaked up a ton from you and the other great photographers here over the last few years. You are an Inspiration and it is a pleasure to try to do my best to follow your footsteps sir.