Well I said when I did my first Wordless/Wordful Wednesday post that I wanted to up my photographic skills this year and try and share what I was learning. Because of the more than kind reaction of people to the shot I took of M&Ms for Scavenger Hunt Sunday I thought I'd show a 'behind the scenes' look at how I did it. Bear with me on this - I've never done one of these before so if there's anything obvious that I've not said then please let me know.
What I used...
First I got a bowl of brightly coloured sweets - because the M&Ms have now disappeared (!), I've used a tube of smarties for illustration purposes here. The M&Ms were brighter in colour and there were more of them, ideally I'd have a lot more sweets in the dish. Then I placed a CD cover on two glasses over the dish - the aim is to put some distance between the CD cover and the sweets to create a blurred background. For the droplets I used a syringe - but a dropper etc would be fine. (The strange shadows in this shot are caused by the kitchen worktop down-lighters!)
Next I placed droplets onto the CD case at random - you can experiment with how big the drops are.
Now for the exhasperating part...
I shot from directly above with my camera set to manual focus using a 55mm lens and with the widest possible aperture. I also put a macro filter on the lens. Then it was a case of focussing on the drops and moving backwards and forwards until the sweets came into focus within them. Don't give up if you can't get it first time - (I tried a few different arrangements of drops until I got one I liked).
Editing wise I was pretty limited as I'm still bereft of my software on the MAC, so I used PIKNIK (Flickr's photo editing site), which is amazingly good! All I did was boost the colours and contrast and clarified it a little - plus the obligatory sharpening.
That's it! Hope that's useful and you have fun giving it a go (by the way I saw a great version of this on Flickr with hot air balloons in the droplets - brilliant!).
Editing wise I was pretty limited as I'm still bereft of my software on the MAC, so I used PIKNIK (Flickr's photo editing site), which is amazingly good! All I did was boost the colours and contrast and clarified it a little - plus the obligatory sharpening.
That's it! Hope that's useful and you have fun giving it a go (by the way I saw a great version of this on Flickr with hot air balloons in the droplets - brilliant!).
