Paint Dance

I really want to re-shoot with more colors, but I'm too excited about this picture to wait to post it. This is a setup that I'd read about a while ago but thought for sure it'd be too difficult with the equipment we've got in my classroom. A sound trigger would be really helpful, but we don't have one.

THE SETUP: A black balloon stretched over a subwoofer so that it would vibrate when a sound was played. We used the sound of a bomb exploding from soundbible.com. The paint is colored with food coloring and thinned a little with water. Then it's poured onto the balloon and the whole thing is shot in the dark with a long exposure of 8 seconds. An f/29 aperture gives a large enough depth of field so that all the paint is in focus. For this picture I used a Nikon D40 with just the 18-55mm lens. It required quite a bit of cropping, so for the re-shoot I think I'll try my D80 with the Macro lens.

THE SEQUENCE: 1. Press shutter release button 2.)Play the sound file and at exactly the same time fire an SB600 Flash. (If we had a sound trigger the flash would be triggered by the sound.)

CREDITS: I really must give credit to my students Cody M. and Cody F., because if it wasn't for them wanting to try this I'd have never tried it myself. Another thank you goes to Lacey T. for assisting on the actual shoot. : ) Search "Canon Pixma: Bringing Colours to Life" on YouTube and you'll see a really cool video that was the inspiration.