For this month’s Big Project we’ll look at how to craft a colourful dancer image from a series of photos of paint. This involves a combination of shooting skills and Photoshop techniques. First, we’ll get set up to shoot vibrant photos of paint by capturing the colours as they travel through water. Once done, we’ll progress into Photoshop where we’ll warp the photos into the shape of our springing dancer. As such, this is effectively two techniques in one, yet each can work separately. So if you’re only interested in capturing beautiful paint abstracts, then you can follow the first part; if you’d rather focus on your Photoshop skills, then you can skip the shooting part and use our paint sploshing in water images (see the download link, top of page 45) to craft your own painterly figures.
For the shoot, we need a clear container full of water. A fish tank is ideal, but any clear plastic or glass container will do. As for the lighting, you can use natural light at a push, but you’ll get better results with an off-camera flash – any budget Speedlite will do. The flash helps to bring out the colours in the paints and freezes the action as the paint travels through the tank of water. Over the page we’ll look at how to get set up with your off-camera flash and how to expose for the shot. We’ll then move on to the Photoshop part of the technique. It may seem complicated, but it’s much easier than it looks…