Stunning Valentine Roses Made From Acrylic Paint

Valentine was yesterday and we thought we will give you some post-holiday roses. Of course those are “photography roses” made with high speed photography by Alex Koloskov and his team at Photigy.

We were wondering how those images came to be and had a chat with Alex.

Alex tells DIYP that there are two main secrets to getting the splashes right: 1) very short flash duration (They were using top notch Broncolors strobes) and 2) shaping the splashes by hand.

Alex also shares that there is an extensive photoshop process involved: “There was an extensive blending work done on several splash images and a flower in Adobe Photoshop CS6. There was clipping, blending and shape modifications using puppet warp tool. Too much to explain in a few words here:-) I’d recommend to take a an online course. There is a few full post-production videos on the course”

Tips!

We also asked Alex if he can share a few tips on the photography part of those splashes.

The recipe is simple: use strobe lighting with a very short flash duration time. It can be expensive and powerful Broncolor or Profoto lighting systems that have short flash duration mode, or it can be tiny battery-powered speedlites (all speedlites has a very short flash duration at 1/4 or lower power).
Set your camera to X-sync shutter speed (about 1/200 sec for most DSLR), use a manual focus and manual exposure, and try to catch splashes on the fly. Use black (for non-transparent liquids) or white (for water) background. If your splash is too dark, try to raise ISO or use a wider aperture.

• Do not forget to protect your gear – one spill can kill your strobe light instantly. We cover everything with sheets of plastic wrap.
• Try not to use a fast shutter speed on a camera (like 1/4000 sec), it won’t work unless you have a special high-speed trigger.
• It is OK to learn how to trigger camera using your hand and remote (wired) trigger. There are special devices that can help to catch the splash, but we do most of our splash photography manually, triggering camera by hand.

If you are interested in the splash photography workshop, here is a quick promo:

P.S. if you are looking for ready made splashes you can check our splash 1 and splash 2 packages.