A friend sent me a link to a little photo project to try, so today I gave it a whirl. The original idea was to mix water and cooking oil and shoot the resulting effect. After initial tests, I decided to mix rubbing alcohol and canola oil. This seemed to work pretty well as the two were easy to stir up and then they slowly separated from tiny circles to progressively larger circles as time went by. I have included an image of my messy setup to give visual aid to anyone wanting to try this. In the setup photo, you will see a clear glass bowl that the camera looks straight down into, and I simply cut a hole in a board slightly smaller than my dish. I did this to keep spill light from the flash hitting anything but my colorful items and not the glass bowl. The arrows point to my two flashes that were aimed at the pile of colorful clothing that I placed about two feet below the dish. Basically the flash hits the colorful items and the liquid picks up the colors. Flashes were set on manual and I shot around f 16-22 for most shots. I may try water and oil at some point,but initially it seemed they separated too quickly. Lens was a 105 micro and I was almost at 1 to 1 magnification.The three white sticks are to keep my dish from moving.


NICE!! Thanks for showing your set up.
Sure. Hard to believe that mess of things produced the shot it did.
Great experiment and nice illustration. I like the results and it would be interesting to see what could be done with a mixture that would swirl, and different colors, etc.. Looks like this year’s winter ‘smoke’ project.
Nice job.
Thanks, great minds think alike, because That very idea was going through my head when I did this. Could not come up with any possibilities though.
Absolutely gorgeous. Interesting to see the before and after. Thanks
thank you
Wow, this is beautiful (as are ALL of your pictures!)! Thank you for the picture on how you set up the shot!
thanks and good luck on your photography.