Oil Painting (Part 3)

Just received an order of food dye to play with (courtesy of my better half), but in the meantime here's another set from my first experimentation with oil in water:

Oil Painting (Part 2)

Some more oil and water images from last weekend - yeah, I really need to get out more!
These involved various backgrounds, producing a very different look to the last set. They include a letter from a utility company.
The thing I love about these is you can really project your own imagination onto the images when interpreting them.

Oil Painting (Part 1)

Something anyone can try at home even with rudimentary camera and lighting equipment is combining oil with water.
Pour some (room temperature) water into a clear-bottomed* glass container and add some cooking oil. Light from underneath and get in close with the camera - Bob's your uncle!
Ok, there's a little more to it than that, but there are already plenty of good tutorials across the web that can get you started.
Once you understand the basics, experiment with different backgrounds, apertures, depths of water, shooting distance and so-on. Its really easy to while away the whole day on this stuff.
*This is fairly important, unless you want to sign all your bubbly masterpieces 'Pyrex'.

Mouse Grill

Before anyone phones the RSPCA, no rodents were cooked during the creation of these images. Last weekend I dusted down the 300mm zoom - my least used lens - in order to record an aerial phenomenon that turned out to be a sun dog. I noticed how the low, late afternoon sun was playing over this metal grill we had installed to prevent the local mice from ransacking our kitchen, so switched to manual focus, and played around creating various 'bokeh' effects with different degrees of un-focus, various focal lengths, and variations in camera-subject distance. The resulting abstract patterns struck me as quite fun, so here they are.

Time, Flies

A simple, if somewhat macabre update. This is how I found the little fella - prone on his back with a hole in his wing. Cause of death - unknown, although as you can see from the position of the legs, it wasn't a high speed collision with a fly swat. Photographed in window light, with fill from the white surface. Minimal editing apart from cropping, contrast curves and the conversion to black and white.

Window Dressing

The images in this update are linked by subject matter - windows.

To begin with, some (more or less) straight images featuring (details of) the stained glass windows adorning St Mary's Church, Wivenhoe. Two have been partially desaturated because I wanted to draw attention to other aspects of the window than the usually-dominant colour.

The middle set are some digital overlays involving the rainscapes from the previous post and images from St Mary's - including one of the windows, the organ, and a floor carving. You are welcome to interpret them as you will. As with most imagery, a variety of conclusions could be equally valid - assuming you sign up to the idea that a work does not merely communicate its author's ideas. Suffice it to say that whilst creating these images I was thinking about E.E. 'Doc' Smith.

The update concludes with two images shot whilst riding on the top deck of a bus on a typical British summer's day.