Photo experiments with K

My last set of pictures from K's visit are the ones we took when trying different photography subjects. K had requested we do the oil and water thing that I did awhile back, and then I added some other things that I wanted to try or retry. It was super nice to have help from someone also interested in photography!

As I'm sure you've gathered, we played around with a black light on a few occasions. It was fun to see what showed up and how, like my shoes (proving that, no, I don't untie them before I take them off...I'm such a grownup).


Then we did a bit of light painting, which I talked about another time (in this post).

Only, instead of flashlights with colored cloth, we used glow sticks, which I felt was much easier (even if you can't turn them off to create spaces in the design).

K got really good at making butterfly wings, and sometimes I could capture a little of her in the picture.

She also did a better tornado than mine (not pictured; it was lame).

But how cool is my flower? It was so fun to be able to take turns trying designs--way more fun than doing this alone!

I can't remember what I was going for with this, but it ended up looking kind of like an open book.

The left is a stick that had three sections of color. The right was when I experimented with tossing the glow sticks so they created a waterfall effect.

The whole experiment was pretty entertaining and hilarious!

Next, we worked on the oil and water pictures. I was able to try some more fabric for background colors.

Unfortunately, I had lost my ring flash when we were doing these. I even texted my parents wondering if I had left it there in April. Embarrassingly, I found it later in a laundry basket (with clean laundry over it--I can never seem to keep up with folding my laundry!!). I'm glad it wasn't really lost, but bummed we weren't able to use it. We did use my other flash and a flashlight, though.

Most of these are K's photos.

The oil and water was bubbling a lot more than last time, maybe due to a change in the type of oil I had on hand. But the bubbles are cool too.

Then this was something I've been wanting to try for a long time--dropping colored water into clear water. We had been watercoloring a couple of nights before and noticed the cool patterns when we dipped the brush in the clean water. I think people use lots of different things for this type of image, but the right consistency of watercolor worked great. Since it was my first time trying, though, we had issues with lighting, the container used (and needing to constantly replace the water), getting the right consistency of paint and just catching the right moment when the drop was looking awesome. It was a lot harder than I thought and I'd like to work on it some more later.

Lots of people have said these look like jellyfish, and I agree. This one has a cyan background due to my photo editing. When I did an auto adjustment of Curves (in Photoshop), it changed the white-gray background to be this aqua color, and K told me to keep it, so I obeyed!

Finally (this has gotten longer than I thought!), K patiently let me try out a concept I had seen on Pinterest at one point. I have tried these light shapes in the past, but hadn't incorporated them into a portrait before. I loooooooved how these looked with the ghostly image of K in the back with the light shapes posed in different ways. She's just holding a string of Christmas lights, but she had some good ideas for how to hold them.

I was having a hard time getting the hearts to show up right, though.

I had much better luck when I switched to the butterfly cut out.

It was hard to narrow these down.

I think having the butterfly "hair" made it seem all fairy-like. This was really fun.

Okay! Thanks so much for looking at my posts/pictures of my time with K. :) Enjoy your week!