For this contrast I wanted water pouring into a glass for the liquid shot, and then ice for the solid. 

For my liquid shot, I planned three different shots – 

1. Water pouring from a height into the glass

2. Water dripping and freezing the splash

3. Two liquids merging. 

I wanted the water to stand out, so I purchased some food colourings in primary colours so that they would mix when they came into contact with each other. I also raided my mothers glass cabinet looking for interesting shaped glass. 

My set-up was fairly simple and exceptionally ghetto. I used two pieces of white backing card that I had  left over from an old project and used these as my base and background upon which the glass was placed. A table lamp was then placed off to the side to provide my light source. 

As usual light turned into the biggest problem as the lamp really doesn’t produce enough, and in my home natural light is in short supply. My next photographic purchase is going to have to be a small daylight lamp that puts out a far higher brightness then the desk lamp I have. 

With the camera mounted on a tripod, I had someone pour various colour liquids into yellow liquid. I needed a fast shutter speed to catch both the drips and mixing of the colours, which necessitated the use of a high ISO to account for the lack of light. Whilst the pouring produced some interesting results, none really popped for me. This was mainly due to the dull light not making the colours appear as bright and saturated as I wanted. 

My second set-up was then to drip a much darker blue into plain water and allow it to mix. This worked much better as I could use a slower shutter speed and the relative lack of light did not affect the colour so much. One last touch I made was to change my light balance to Tungstun as this changed the property of the orange/yellow light into a nice vivid shade of blue which suited the clear glass and blue dye much better.

I’d already got the shot that I knew I wanted, but since I had the time and materials, I decided to have a play recording the splashes. This did not go as well as the other two set-ups in producing the results I wanted. First the dyed water just wasn’t thick enough to produce the kind of heavy splash I was looking for. I think something like milk could work better. Secondly, that lack of light meant using a slower shutter speed once again. Finally with the lens I had available I was unable to get as close into the action as I would have liked, so the splashes look rather unimpressive with significant cropping. However, as I say this particular shot was always intended to be additional learning rather then my planned submission. 

Solid

For solid I wanted to use a mould that I acquired some time ago that creates a tube of ice that is intended to be used as a shade for a tealight candle. 

The base of the holder is metallic, and I decided to compliment this by using tinfoil as a backdrop and base. I was also hoping that the tinfoil would reflect some of the candlelight and make an interesting backdrop. 

In the flesh the candlelight looked pretty, but as a still shot it didn’t really come to life as the surrounding area was too dark, and the uniform orange of the candlelight didn’t reflect from all the cracks and bubbles in the ice as I expected. 

To compensate for this, I dug out a mood light that I have which runs on batteries. This uses blue LED’s to produce clouds of light on a ceiling and also throw out red laser stars. 

First I took longer exposure shots and manually moved the new light around the area to ‘paint’ it. This gave more atmosphere, but it was still not quite as I was hoping for, so I went hunting for something that could be placed behind the candle and could be illuminated by the moodlight. 

I found a glass vase and set this up behind, when the mood light was switched on it glowed a nice blue, and had the benefit of illuminating the parts of ice that the candle wasn’t. It also made a nice progression from the red/orange at the base near the candle to blue at the top.

Now I positioned the camera right in to the ice framing so that I lost the base completely as even thought it was metallic it was just not reflecting any light at all and making it seem like the ice was just suspended in air. 

I took a couple of shots with just the ice filling the frame, but it just felt too busy and disorientating for my tastes. So I pulled out a little and left a black edge to give a clear delineation between the ice, the vase and the background which I think gives a nicer balance to the shot.