Create rainbow flares with a CD for colorful macro photography

The glorious colours of summer are fading away, and the windy weather makes outdoor macros difficult. In other words, it’s the perfect time to take photography inside and stage creative photos with things around the house. Anything could be an ingredient in your creative recipe. These ingredients can be simple things, such as in this example: A CD, a Milkweed seed and some water, put together on a reflective piece of glass, made for the images in this article.

A third-hand soldering station holds everything together; the perfect work station for indoor macro projects. I placed the seed on the glass plate and misted with a syringe. (Misters tend to get the seed to wet to quickly.) For even more surface tension you can mix glycerin with the water.

Next I hold the CD in the background and preview the colours in the viewfinder with a flashlight. The camera is triggered via intervelometer as I move the CD to create different reflections. A simple on-camera flash works fine for this; pulling the white bounce card out helps.

The difference that CD makes for the images is stunning and every image will show different colours and gradients. The two photos below illustrate side-by-side how the image comes to life, once all ingredients are in place.

For even more information and a better peek behind the scenes you can watch the making of video here:

If you mount your camera on a tripod you can even combine the most vibrant parts of each image you take into one super colourful image. Just Load them into a stack in Photoshop (“Files”→”Scripts”→”Load files into Stack…”) or your favourite image editor and merge them via Layer masks.

The result can look somewhat like this:

I hope you enjoyed the creative input and the peek behind the scenes. Cheers!

About the Author

Maximilian Simson is a macro photographer based in London, Ontario. You can find more of his work and creative ideas on his website and YouTube channel, and follow him on Instagram and Facebook. This article was also published here and shared with permission.