Trying it again, different things to do...

On a cold winter's night.

First some steel wool

 

Add some crinkled foil behind it and a blue light.

Hmm, needs more color or something. Add some pink dried flowers!

So I added some reddish orange light to bounce off the foil in the background and left the blue light shining up from below.

Use a mister or a spray bottle to add water droplets.

It took a few adjustments to find something I liked and
I picked this one.

and this one....

a small change in the position of 

the colored lights and the steel

wool

changes everything.

I'm still working on perfecting something with the steel wool. I am making good use of it though as it is also handy at cleaning rust off from stuff!

👌

Now the ICM has me so intrigued so I thought I'd look up some more info on it. I ran across a guy named David Day who does ICM Still Life photography in a studio setting. That intrigued me because seriously the constant freaking cold days is wearing me down.

He uses pieces of plants, layers of tissue paper, paper, rocks, bark, and anything you can think of to shoot with ICM. Some of it is really out of this world, but you can really use your imagination and 'see' something.

Anyway he used some colored electric wire in one video. It made me curious so I searched the house for something like his wire to try my own ICM still life experiment.

I ended up going into my junk drawer and finding some different colored twist ties. I clipped them together and lit them from the side with a flash light. It was nothing like David's set up, but heck, I'm always up to see if I can do something similar.

So, these were two of my favorite ones from Thursday night. 

The writing on the one twist tie looks like stripes in the shots.

Do I know what I am doing? 

Nope.

But it sure is fun!

I liked this ICM better because it wasn't like doing  a landscape shot. I'm still working on the landscapes but thought I'd give this a whirl. 

So I took a lot of shots. Some I missed the subject completely. Some I were just awful. It takes a lot of practice and muscle memory to do this.  Moving the camera around a small object while the shutter is open isn't that easy.

But the results can be wild.

I also tried some of the dried pink flowers.

What I found is...

Less is more. 

So I just pulled the flowers apart until I had a little stem.

Another thing I noticed, is having more than one color is very helpful. There was a brown undyed flower in this little stem and I like how that color showed through.

Last. Dried tan flowers with a green stick and the clip with the orange end.

Happiness is experimentation.

Long ago I used to work with fractal programs, so abstraction is not something that is foreign to me. This is a bit more fun as I'm not dealing with formulas.

I guess I am just pretty cheap to entertain in the evenings. Junk drawer twist ties, pieces of flowers, flashlight, and a camera.

A bit of fun

Just goofing around.

When the temps get way below zero and the winds are blowing, I do stay inside and mess around with photography experiments and make a mess.

I check in on a photographer who does 'macro' work indoors when the weather is nasty. He has some extremely creative ideas and he explores them.

He used a piece of cotton [like thick cotton balls] glued to a popsicle frame he made. He put a small hole in the middle of it and shot his flower shots through the cotton.

I thought this was interesting so I grabbed an old picture frame and did something similar with felt and bubble wrap.

I set things up on the table and then used a colored light to bounce of my background made out of tin foil.

Of course there were quite a few shots that didn't turn out as I would have liked, but then I kept experimenting. These were tiny dried flowers for crafting.

Finally I got one I could live with. 

I didn't have to do any editing for this shot as 'shooting' through the torn cotton gave the edges a soft hazy look. I thought I'd try it again and do a Lego Minifigure portrait.

Here are two samples. In the first you can see the foil background that creates a cool pattern behind this Dnd minifig. Her name is Lady of Pain. 

This second shot is with more of the cotton in the way and the lens slight pulled back. I also stood her on a Lego brick that lights up red to highlight her from inside. This shot almost looks as if she has cold air circulating around her or a mist of some sort.

What the set up looked like. 

What my table looked like on our first subzero day:

I had three sets of scenes built. My $1 dinosaur fit into a storyline I'd was creating for a series on Flickr.

The Queen of Pain sent her Zombie Emissary to the Minibots and spoke to Iggy [the minibot with one eye]. She wished to have a custom Ferrari built for her.

Iggy can usually get anything or steal it so he agreed to get a red Ferrari for her.

They got parts but had no idea how to put things together. Todd, the maintenance guy offered to help.

Since Iggy and his Minibots were taking too much time to do this. The Lady of Pain sent her messenger to Iggy to tell him to hurry up. Pretty nasty threat, I'd say!

[Don't worry, no toys were actually harmed in this photoshoot]

I guess all they had to do was ask Todd the Zombie Maintenance guy to help out.

It seemed Todd took it upon himself to help out the Minibots. He called in a couple of Zombie friends....they worked all through the night sorting and building.

I guess if you want a job done quickly and correctly, you hire Zombies. After all, they don't sleep and apparently their work ethic is fantastic.

Hopefully the Lady of Pain will enjoy her new ride.

Yippee! It is the Polar Plunge!