Just Photos: a Journal by Srinivas

One can entertain oneself in self-imprisonment with a few simple, cool tools quite easily.  A snap ware bowl, a couple of tablespoons of oil, and a few diluted drops of Diamine Cerise Ink, and you got yourself some entertainment.  A coffee table with a glass top and a tiny set of LED lights with or without filters covered by a paper napkin for somewhat diffuse backlighting, and you are ready to go. Being a 70s kind of guy, I always wanted a lava lamp, and never got around to getting one.  But this will do just fine: Good, brief bouts of respite from the torture of interminable BlueJeans meetings.

It is incredible to see how many videos and tutorials there are on youtube explaining interesting little projects one can do in every realm of life, and especially in photography, photo editing, etc.  This video by Gavin Hoey was suggested to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKp8YO2DkwA I found it intriguing and tried it out with a very simple setup today.  All that it needed was a glass of water, a background he provides that you can print out, and a sheet of glass or plexiglass with a black background on which to rest the glass.  And of course, a camera with a tripod.  I was able to put this together in a few minutes, and the magic of reversal of an image due to refraction/internal reflection, and other optics phenomena leads to an interesting geometric pattern with a, dare I say, artistic quality. Feel free to try out some of these experiments shown in the video yourself. After this initial experiment, I decided to try out a couple of more patterns. ...