January 13th, 2010
Theme: Macro Abstract

For the 365 Challenge today, I wanted to do something using gels… looking around my house and taking some things out of a drawer I ended up with this:

I’ll explain next how I did this step by step.

Photo equipment: D40x, SB-800, green gel, transceiver and receiver, tripod.

Materials: Zipper bags (clear), a green dish scrubber, water.

Settings on camera:
Exposure:0.033 sec (1/30)
Aperture:f/5.6
Focal Length:35 mm
ISO Speed:200
Exposure Bias:+1 EV

Settings on flash:
Manual mode
Power: 1/16

When I started I didn’t know exactly what I was going to end up with, so I put the scrubber inside the zipper bag and tried first with a small LED…

… as you can see the light source is very small so I tried the SB-800 as my main light with a green gel.

Water makes things more interesting in pictures so I decided to filled the bag (just half) with water. My setup looked like this…

(I use the slaves because my camera can’t handle the TTL by itself)

I took a couple of pictures and I got this:

Since I can’t get any closer with the 35mm (it won’t focus), I had to crop it in post. I used Lightroom to do that, also added blacks and clarity… and ended up with this…

I did some tests using the Mini Apollo on the SB-800 and got some other interesting results, also I filled the bag up completely with water ….

Final image:

After crop: