ingredients used: 90mm macro lens, mini flash w/ bounce card and diffuser, soy milk, red / blue / yellow food dyes, dish soap, photoshop
are these images just finger painting for adults with fancy cameras?
automatic abstractions?
a day’s work for the butterfly catcher?
a lazy man’s digital tie dye?
I think they’re best compared to an 8 year old’s glee at slathering paint every which way, and their satisfaction over a wall colorfully vandalized. yet the basic concept / technique may be able achieve more interesting, lovely, weird and abstract images. in some ways they’re sort of like asymmetrical Rorschach tests: faces and eyes of fish and dogs and moons, etc. – everyone sees different things. it may be that shapes and negative space rather than Pollack-ian splatter make for better pictures, though splatter and swirls can be cool if you know what you’re doing (i don’t). one thing i like about the way dye and soap behave in milk is how some colors and shapes have different qualities of opacity and transparency – it creates an almost biological feel, shapes filled with breath, veins and soft tissue. this exercise has got me thinking about what specifically makes this “bad” art: surface vs depth, concept vs improvisation, randomized process vs symbolic or subconscious messages, etc.
i’m still struggling to control the macro lens. i can’t seem to get enough depth of field even at f/6.3 so that bubbles of different sizes are all in focus in the same shot. maybe raising the tripod to get more distance between the subject and the lens could help.
one thing i’m realizing, but not putting into practice, is that it’s probably always a good idea to keep trying to build on photo shoots rather than abandon them as one off experiments. losing interest in photographing certain subjects, using certain gear, like those on display here, means that i’m only documenting the least skilled approach (the first time out) and not trying to improve on those unrefined beginnings.
