Paint On A Speaker

I've been meaning to try out some more high-speed macro photography ever since I tried doing the coffee drop shots. I found some inspiration in PhotoBoothGuy's work. He has an awesome write-up/tutorial on how he does his water figure shots here. Using that, I grabbed my Logitech sub woofer and set up in the garage. Of course I forgot to take a shot of the setup, but it was just a sub woofer propped up on two tissue boxes on a card table with lots of paper towels covering everything. I set up my Nikon D60 w/ 18-200mm (didn't want to get too close with the 35-70mm because there would be paint splashing everywhere) on a tripod. Strobist was two Sunpak 333's at 1/16th power on stands to the left and right of the tripod at a general 45 degree angle. The heights varied as I figured out what I was doing. I didn't have an infrared or sound flash trigger of any kind (I should probably build one from a kit) so I used a knockoff infrared remote and winged it.

I didn't have a nice small powerful speaker I could put a ballon or piece of rubber over (though I'm not sure that's what Ryan does - he mentioned using a sub woofer in a post). Regardless, I wasn't sure whether to use the side with the speaker or the hole that vents air.

I started with the hole on the side of the sub since I anticipated more air coming out. I taped a piece of black plastic cut out of a garbage bag over the side and tried various shots with different amounts of paint and different mixes of water and paint. Not much happened other than making a mess. The problem seemed the be creating a tight seal around the hole which the garbage bag didn't do a great job of. It was also a pain to wipe off.

So I tried the side of the sub with the speaker. More tape and plastic, only to have similar results. I tried one with a lot of paint and just made this mess. (Other reason for setting up the blog: I can post shots like this without clogging up my Flickr.)

Gold Acrylic Paint

So, what to do now? It was really hot in the garage, and the results were not encouraging. But then I got the idea of sticking some kind of tube into the hole that I could stretch a balloon over. Half of a toilet paper roll with a cut up balloon and a rubber band jammed through some paper towels into the hole did the trick (the full roll created too much space and didn't have the same kick). It took a bunch of shots but I started to get the hang of it. Unfortunately I was more focused on getting the thing to work that I didn't think to lower my camera to let the darkness in the back serve as a background. Here's what it looked like (mix of purple and gold metallic paint):

And another shot that would've been much better had I positioned the camera properly. (I also managed to have the leveling slightly off, or maybe the tube was just crooked, but I had to crop the images anyways so it wasn't a problem).

Two nice shots of purple paint:

A mix of milk or cream (can't remember, I tried both) and blue dye.

Milk and green dye (mixed together before being put on the speaker).

There's some kind of ghost from the flashes being out of sync. It may have been due to using two slightly different models of a knockoff $20 flash trigger. After this shot I switched to one flash (I have two of the triggers that match so I'll use those next time). I still thought it looked cool; some people may desire that effect.

And the best shot was the most delicious: smoothie.