Shooting special effects

This was a fun but of experimentation.

If you can believe it I did this by squirting ink into a fish tank and then layering it in After Effects.

The devil is in the details. I layered it and darkened the blacks using curves. Then I added a luma key to drop out the black entirely. The ink was originally red and blue. I added a couple of keyframes using the change colour to effect to make it more dynamic. Near the end those effects are entirely playing with the light on set.

I borrowed and cleaned this cracked fish tank Ray had laying around. It needed a bit of love and a really good scrubbing. Then eventually I took multiple trips back and forth to the sink to fill it with super ice cold water and some bleach.

I made sure I had everything I needed close at hand. I set it up in front of the big black backdrop I previously painted. I put some buckets under the folding table to fortify it in case it collapsed under the weight of the water. I had extra towels ready since it leaks a bit. I set up my Canon DSLR to take HD video and got deeper than my elbows into the special effects photography.

To light particles in air or water you must have a hard light source coming from the rear. This is 3/4 cross lit from the back at a high angle. When I get my camera set up just right you cant tell it is a tank full of water. I'm not going to give away everything I shot or how it will be used yet until my project is further along. A guy's got to keep some mystery :)

Needless to say, I am very happy with how it turned out, it went better than I expected though it took a lot longer than I anticipated. This is the part that really slows down the process, filling and draining the big tank of water. I'm glad I selected the smaller tank. The bigger one would have taken forever to fill and drain. I still have to shoot another session with this set up in the next few weeks for some additional elements like smoke and fire. I cant wait.

Testing my lenses

I wanted to get a sense of what the three lenses I currently have form my Canon T3i are capable of. My T3i DSLR does not use a "full frame" sensor. That means I have some cropping or what they refer to as a multiplier. I think its about 1.5.This means my 50 mm. lens will behave on this camera body more like a 75mm lens on a full sized sensor camera.
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I wanted to get a sense of focal length and cropping on the composition. I left the camera on the tripod in a fixed position. I focused on a piece of paper hung in the same position in each shot to see how each lens with different focal lengths focuses. I set up my camera on the very busy side wall of the class room at Quickdraw Animation Society.

We will start with my zoom lens that came with the camera when I bought it. It is an 18-55mm lens. This is zoomed out at the furthest out setting (Z 18) in order to see what the largest field of view is.  There is a bit of blurring at both front and back objects.

Next, I zoom in with the 18-55 mm. (Z 35) to create a medium shot with this lens. The background is more blurred and seems truncated in space.

Here is the 18-55 mm. (Z 55) zoomed in all the way. The frame is a fraction of what it was when it was zoomed out.

My 50mm. lens is my prime. It has a fixed focal length and does not zoom.It is a similar framing size as the 18-55 mm allt he way zoomed in. However the depth of field blurring is far more pronounced. This is a better choice when I want to blow/blur out the background in a shot at this focal sdistance.

Finally the 40 mm. pancake lens. It has a much wider field of view. It is rather close to the 'medium shot" of the 18-55 mm but has a lot more blurring in the background.