Fire and Water…

Weather is cooling down! Oh my what a relief! Sunrise is getting late few minutes by each day and thus I'm leaving to work every morning while it's dark somehow, and it will be darker and darker soon. I love the atmosphere, if not for some of the stupidity on the road of course. I just hope that this winter would not pass without some outside work with the camera, again. Anyway, as a continuation

Tine Agus Uisce

If you are wondering about the meaning of the subtitle here, it just means Fire and Water and you will know why just now, After finishing my work with dice and water, I thought maybe I should do another thing before I move away my gear from the set. And it occurred to me: Why not candles? Surely we can have some action by that, right? Besides, I do have a bunch of candles left around which I bought for some other project in the past and I hate to see them collecting dust like that for nothing! So here we go…

Aqua-Sword

Aqua-Meteor

Initially, the idea was to capture the moment just before the candle's flame goes off by a blow of air. I used a compressed air canister for that. However, where is the action in that? So, right away, I've decided to change my work to include water and fire. Working with water here is a bit dangerous because it might get sprinkled around the set and all that (which it did) but small amounts of that from a syringe hurt no one, I think! And so, the game began trying to capture the right time manually. The good thing about using a syringe is the change in angles now and then, trying to get different perspectives and different action. The hard thing was, though, is getting the sprinkled water right on the flame, which caused many shots have out of focus droplets, sometimes beyond repair and not serving the image in general at all, somehow like Aqua-Meteor, but I like this one somehow.
The depth of field here ranged between f/4 to f/5.6, despite the usage of a macro lens; Canon EF 100mm Macro USM. I lowered the f-number here for two main reasons:

• Even though using 6 speedlites, I thought of lowering the power consumption to have even a shorter "flash duration" which I thought it would be better somehow to capture more precise moments. This of course requires allowing more light in by increasing the ISO or lowering the f-number, and so it was the second (while ISO was fixed at 200).
• The background contained some metallic bar which I couldn't cover, and increasing the depth of field (i.e. increasing the f-number) would cause it to be quite obvious and hard to fix later in Photoshop. In fact, it was already problematic in some shots at this f/5.6.

Der Kampf
One of the shots where
water droplets were not
stable enough even at
the speed of 8000^-1s.

All shots were taken at 1/8000 of a second for the shutter speed and this time I didn't try to gamble with the shutter speed. Yet, I think I do need more than 1/8000s to stabilize the water movement further from what I saw in the final results. I think I will do some research about available tricks to overpass this speed in high speed photography techniques. ِAnother problem was there to be dealt with which was the changing level of the candle flame itself (because of melting). So, it was a work of lowering and raising the tripod's neck (central column) and re-focusing, and forgetting to focus already for some shots. In fact, I've tried to make it a habit for me to check the focus after every shot I made in that session. Anyhow, seems I really need to work on that background in the future, in case I'm working in such set, in such place, again.



Luckily, this set of shots was accepted right away without any refusal on Canstockphoto and on Dreamstime. Probably by the time you are reading this you would be seeing some of these images in my signature frame below the post. Now, there is one more idea which I wish to do at some time but not sure when (priority goes to photo shooting more than editing) and that is to combine several of these recent shots and make new ones of various combination of fire, water and smoke. I'm sure it would be such a delicate work and probably I won't produce much images that way, but it is worth trying.

Finale

Well, on a side note, after more than a year of stopping posts on Instagram (and I mean photos, not posts related to my Ayvarith conlang on @Ayvarith), I've started to slowly post back. But this time I won't be paying attention to that stupid platform. Some people welcomed me in fact with my first post after the stop. An encouraging sign but still I didn't put much effort into that. Beside that, I've posted once a day only (so far as I'm typing this 2 photos were posted). I used post at least twice a day back when I was active there. In fact, I've even considered having a third new account to post stuff from scratch but I've forgot about this idea and decided to go back to my old account. This time though, no following, no like for like; Just nothing. I'm posting there, and whoever wants to, can give a like and leave. It would depend on my mood and my schedule as well. So, posts won't be schedules as before and I'm already planning to stop posting in some days if I have to.
In the meantime, thoughts about my life and destination is still a recurring idea in my mind. I'm not sure I do have a goal and despite about all what I hear, from all these motivational speakers, about the importance of setting a goal; I still feel that it is all nothing but rubbish. Not aiming to disregard what other people feel about themselves or the things they feel important but I'm seriously in the status of not finding any value; Specially in these societal standards and hypocrisy necessities. There is a feeling going inside when I see newspapers, TV, two people talking, something strange just tells me all that is an act. All are nothing but actors...
Just a final thought, I've made an astrological reading (paid) and one of the questions I've asked was about career or career path and what is best for me in general. I have to say that the reading in general blew me away and the lady did pin the nature of my current work without telling her anything about it. It seems I do have to focus away from the scientific field indeed. She said things will take time to find out and to get along and find the real passion in my life - well, after all the information she gave out about me (even about my delayed speech problem when I was a child), I tend to believe her in fact. Maybe then all these motivational stuff that people have the vibe with currently would make some sense to me? We'll see. For the time being, I really just want to enjoy "some" of my life; Just as she said as well.

تلاقي (Meeting)