Photos, Drawings, Thoughts and Tantrums

So I tried to do some “levitation” photography with a Broken mug. The concept is very easy but it's quite lengthy and requires a bit of patience to get the things done correctly.  At first my approach was to be as ‘realistic’ as possible, but then I resorted to aim towards a more surrealistic final image, just to add a bit of fun into it.  The setup, was quite simple indeed (2 light stands with a mid support to tie the mug parts) and I used 2 X Speedlight flashes for the background lighting and front highlights. The difficult part comes when ‘hanging’ the pieces of porcelain and here Live View in Capture One really helps, since you can actually see all the composition and arrange stuff as you go along.  Here is the final image:  The Coffee Pour - Wil Camilleri

Some of my Light Painting Photo experiments.... Light Painting Whisky Glass Light Painting Book Alessi Characters - Light Painting Alessi Characters - Light Painting 2

In this shoot , I wanted to introducing a product in splash photography and I chose to go with a cute Gin Mare MINI Bottle. I am including the setup I used below,In which I used 2 speed lights one of which was with a mini soft box to create the foreground light.  Adding splashes is easy, but it doesn’t obey any rules, so you need to try, try & try. Photoshop helps a lot in blending images together to get a more balanced look of the product and the splashes created and this was the post technique I used in this case.  Gin Mare Mini Photo - Wil Camilleri The Setup used

I started experimenting with Splash photography, using water droplets, using flash (in this case speed-lights) to capture the freeze moment. The set up, as shown below, is relatively easy. Although I managed to get some decent images out of it, I want to explore better ways of doing this to maximize the instances of getting the “perfect splash”. Work in Photoshop for this was quite minimal and involved mainly removing stray drops and retouching the ‘horizon’ so its fully level - the rest was all coming directly from the camera. An this is the image achieved. Splash Photo Setup

Don't you find yourselves facing a dilemma what kind of editing you will do to an image? I know I do! Although the approach and the style is usually already set in mind during time of shooting, still the question of how much editing a photo needs can arise. I personally try to do just the essential and address the immediate needs of a photo - but what do you do when you want to make something more artistic? I think the artist should do as he feels and just go for it - although here I should say "without overdoing it!" - since sometimes there are some photos in which you cannot see the photo anymore among all the editing! Also one pretty common problem is that you get stuck with a style. It happens to everyone I guess ( or else I just hope) cause surely it happens to me. Well try to vary styles and try out new techniques - read blogs and tutorials and simply take bits and pieces of ideas and apply them to your images and see how they work out - well the sky is the limi...