this ruined my fake poster board light box

i spilled water all over it because i suck... anyway, please give me an honest critique on this! any thoughts, comments, or critiques are very welcome, be brutal!

Nice idea. But I think your cup is a little dirty or the water is too hard. If you use distilled water you get a more crisp clear water. But overall its a nice picture. Did you take any other angles? I like to shoot with Vodka. It looks cool because it swims and its a great treat to drink after shooting. Can't waste a good glass of vodka!

Distilled water would have been an excellent idea... i would have been really mad if i had spilled vodka. i shot a few other angles, i just loved the way it refracted here

OK, for a school science experiment on refraction, but otherwise it doesn't quench my thirst.

cwmehring wrote in post #6287030
I like to shoot with Vodka. It looks cool because it swims .......

Would that be before or after?

no school experiment, this is one of those shots that i took just because i had the right things laying around... i thought it came out pretty cool for what is essentially a meaningless shot.

glass seems a little soft (at least the foreground rim portion).

The lighting seems a bit bright to me, I'd prefer to see the blacks as BLACK, and yeah the glass like someone else said, but I love the shot and the concept. Clean the glass, tweak the exposure a bit, and I don't think it's 'meaningless' at all.

What did you use for the background?

I think it's an interesting idea and a pretty cool shot but the one thing bothering me here is the checkerboard pattern...it almost seems a little distorted. Looking at the left and bottom edges of the picture it looks straight, but as the eye moves up and in towards the glass it starts to look tilted. It very well could be just an optical illusion, but to me it actually looks like some kind of lens distortion maybe. Either way I find it rather distracting...it pulls my eye away from the glass which is obviously the central subject here.

Just my $.02 worth!
Jim

I like the overall idea. I think moving the angle or the glas so that a B/W intersection is directly in the middle of the glass would be nicer. Also if you get the right angle on the water with your light you can probably get a nice refraction. That would be a nice color add to it.

I would use a finer glass.....this one is thick.

Nw85887- I tried to get the whole thing as in focus as I possibly could, I even shot this at f16 to give me a pretty big DOF, but I did miss the mark a bit... very frustrating

Photoguy6405- the lighting was actually pretty cheaply put together, just 3 60 watt lamps attached around the ‘lightbox’... I was trying to light it up as brightly as I could, but I do think I may have gone a bit overboard… I didn’t notice the blacks were a bit off until you pointed it out, but I now know how to fix that for the next time. I got the background after googling “checker board pattern” and doing an image search. I’m glad you liked it!

Walczak Photo- do you thing the distortion could have been caused by using a narrow aperture (f16)?

Aram535- I’m glad you liked it! I shot one with the b&w intersecting right behind the glass, but something looked a bit off to me after I saw it… I think having one square stretch all the way across makes the glass seem much bigger than it is. Although after I build another lightbox, I am definitely going to try to get a shot with the intersection right behind the glass, and I am most definitely going to try to get the refraction… that would look really cool!

Flo- I absolutely agree… that coupled with distilled water or vodka to get cleaner water would make this shot a lot better.


Thank you all so much for the feedback… now to go buy some more poster board for a reshoot….

It's too soft. I think the focus point was on the background and not the rim of the glass.