The Great Banini
by
jperez1690Comment by jperez1690: Sweeeeeeeet!
There were some great pictures in this challenge. So I'm stoked that this shot did as well as it did.
I learned a few things in the process...
1. Dry ice screams when held tightly in tongs
2. Wife screams when she sees what you've done to the bedroom...and the fruit
erm...
sorry for any offense given with phalic overtones, by the way. I knew at the outset that was going to be a pretty inseparable feature of what I was trying to put together. But I swear, man, I was totally going for the circus theme as the main thrus...uh...feature.
m'kay...
So there were some other things I learned:
1. Soft Natural Light. I have squat for light equipment. I was trying to light this travesty with my wife's make-up mirror thing, and every shot was lousy with hot spots and horrible color. So out of desperation, I stepped up the exposure to 30 seconds and just used the ambient light that was filtering in through a north facing window in the room. It gave everything a smooth soft-box lighting.
2. Smoke Effects. The theory of puddling water in shallow, oddly contoured fruit and plunking little pieces of dry ice in it for smoke visuals is sadly flawed. You get about 2 seconds of heavy mist before the bottom of the dry ice chunks get a protective coat of ice water, or the puddle freezes over and the mist dwindles away. Which leads to...
3. Fudging on Long Exposures. Because I wasn't getting the smoke effect I needed over the 30 second exposure, I had to find a way of keeping the dry ice and water in constant agitated contact. So I grabbed one of those little plastic syringes you get with kid's medicine (because the only squirt bottle we have is decrepit and won't squirt a stream any narrower than 45 degrees :P ). So for the first 20 seconds of the exposure, I filled and squirted the syringe into the banana cavity I think 3 times. That was enough to keep the little dry ice pebbles tumbling around and steaming up really nice. I know that my hand and the syringe would enter the frame every time, but I tried to keep my arm moving and firing from different angles each time so it didn't expose any one part of the frame too much. And because the light was dim and exposure long, it worked.
4. Canon EOS Rebel noise (lack thereof). I have been really impressed with how well this camera handles noise over long exposures. So far, I've taken 90 second exposures at 100 ISO, and haven't encountered any noise problems so far.
Thanks for all the comments!
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