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.