Happy Valentine’s day! I poked around the backlog of clips I had looking for something that was in any way related to Valentine’s day and this was the closest I came. I was hoping I would have another camera by now as I had something rather specific planned but that will have to wait until next year I suppose. Now, on to the clip!
This video is cornstarch mixed with water and food coloring being poured into water. Corn starch and water make for some of the most interesting looking cloud shapes I’ve seen. On the movement end the billowing you get when its being poured in is really amazing. If I remember properly the cloud tank shots for ‘The Never Ending Story’ were done using this method. Generally you wouldn’t want to use a curved glass bowl like I am using but instead a square or rectangular box. The curved glass will add distortions and also modify the flow of the fluid. In this instance that was exactly what I wanted. You will no doubt notice the horrible flickering, this comes from having the wrong type of light. The lights I was using for this shot cycle at 60hz and we are at a sufficient speed as to make that flicker noticeable. Incandescents and HMI lighting do not generally have this problem. Though from what I understand running lights off of DC power also greatly reduces this particular effect. The reason it is so much more noticeable in this shot as opposed to the others I have shot is the use of the light cube. The light cube is a white nylon box that you use in photography to get a nice even diffused lighting with little to no reflection in metal or glass. It also works well for this type of shot providing your lighting is good. Due to the way it works in diffusing the light, the flickering effect is now full screen instead of instances where I shot against black. A black background doesn’t reflect the light and so the flicker is less pronounced. So that is the bad, the good is the end result on the lighting of the subject. The end result will look familiar to those in the CG industry, it is the same effect one gets when using a GI (global illumination) dome. A GI dome produces a nice even lighting from all angles, which makes for very soft shadows and a great deal of depth. Accessibility shading also produces a similar result by calculating where the light has access to. We can see the same effect here with the cloud, the outer areas where there is no folding of the material to create shadowing is evenly lit, while the nooks and crannies end up considerably darker. The primary difference between this and CG is that in CG one couldn’t render this out at these speeds, GI calculations involve radiosity which is incredibly calculation intensive and thus takes a long time to render. Fluids were one of my primary focus areas when I was doing CG work and a scene like the one above would take days of calculation for the fluid and days of rendering to generate a similar result. The end result in CG would not have looked as good as the above clip, though one would have far more control over a similar CG shot. The clip has had significant post processing in an attempt to reduce the flicker (as bad as it is, it was worse).
The full rez clip will be around 3GB but I will be posting it for free as I just don’t feel right charging for the amount of flicker present in the shot. It does make it useless for anything aside from studying the fluids motion.
Full Resolution download: Coming soon…
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For this shot I dropped a quarter into a pan of milk. I thought that the quarter would produce a more interesting splash that just a typical drop of another fluid. Sure enough it did. The quarter had enough weight to really push out the milk. The shape of the splash turned out really neat. The way it collapses back in on itself was pretty neat, but not too much different from the last milk splash I did. The thing that most struck me with this shot is how the only thing that is really clearly in focus as the quarter hits is the word Liberty at the top of the quarter, hence the name of this post. Though I have to confess Liberty Milk sounds a bit Orwellian and kind of creepy, though it really shouldn’t. I suppose I’ve read 1984 one too many times.
In this shot we take a close up look at shaving gel. I’ve spent a decent amount of time staring at my shaving gel, primarily because I really liked the refraction and the way it emphasizes the curves and ripples. Shaving gel has some rather neat properties, high viscosity, high transparency, and high refraction. All of these make for a great subject for macro photography and filming (at least in high-speed). In the thousands of times I have used shaving gel I never really appreciated exactly how solid it is once it is out of the can and reacting with the air. In the video you can notice it maintaining the splash pattern instead of collapsing down to nothingness as a less viscous fluid (water, milk) would. You can also notice the way this allows it to cut paths through itself. My favorite bit has to be the curling of the gel as its forming, the shapes are interesting and pretty. It is also interesting to note the change in transparency over time. The change in transparency is caused by the formation of bubbles as the gel reacts with air, part of what makes it foam. When you just let it sit there the bubbles tend to form on the outside vs when you are smoothing it out in your hands and it all becomes foamy. This makes for some (in my opinion) very pretty photos. The camera on this shot was roughly 8″ from the subject. Once again, sorry for the strobing, hopefully soon we’ll receive some better high-speed lighting rigs.
This one just wouldn’t break. I suppose there was not quite enough water in it. It certainly made for a semi-interesting shot though. I’ve seen several of these types of videos before and it always fascinates me. The contortions a balloon goes through are fascinating. They almost look alive, in some kind of living jelly loaf fashion. Since this shot is really not terribly useful in any way I can think of the full resolution clip for this one will be free once I get it uploaded.Full Resolution download: WaterBalloon1.rar, JPG Sequence, 754MB, Free – Right Click/Save as…here.
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The third and final in the set we shot that night. This is my favorite of the three, the fireball looks the cleanest in this one. The fire we used to light it is interesting as well. This was three large fireplace lighters (already lit once) doused in lighter fluid and then lit. The wind had kicked up a bit so we needed some extra oomph.Full Resolution download: AcetyleneExplosion3.mov, Uncompressed QT MOV, 35MB – Free – Right Click/Save as…here.
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Same setup as last time only this time I doubled the speed and removed the lexan sheild. I still see a reflection in it, but since I removed the lexan shield I figure it must be either light bouncing off the background or something going on in the lens itself. Also in igniting this one we used a really old and very decrepit (It was having a heck of a time) sparkler instead. This is the smallest of the three balloons.Thanks to Matt Deal of Matt Deal Farms for the use of the land for our explosive escapades.
This shot was one of those that just kind of pop up and you have to take advantage of. I was setting up for a shot where I was going to squirt strawberry icee syrup into milk. The container for the syrup was sitting next to the pan with the milk and this fly decided to dine on some of the syrup. Apparently this makes a fly really lazy and not too worried about…well…anything. I took about 10 pics with my still camera (having taken the lens off the high-speed cam to do so) and since he seemed willing to put up with that I put the lens back on the HSVC (high-speed video camera), re-setup the shot to be focused on the fly. All of this took about 10 minutes. I figured he would probably bolt but it was my lucky day, he stayed put. Once the camera was all setup and I was sure it was focused I shooed him off. All of this made for a really neat shot and couple of cool photos. I included one of the better photos below.
