1994

On this page, I would like to show you some of my pictures from my early attemps back in 1994. I had then already experimented with different fluids (water, milk, fruit juice), backgrounds, shapes and timing, and you can see the results below. Besides the normal columns and craters, I had also created some crowns, abstract shapes and even a drop-on-drop sculpture (though I have to admit the latter was by accident and I didn't see the potential of it at that time).

In retrospect, of course, the pictures are way behind of what is now possible, but they always remind me of the trouble I had to go through at that time before I got any reasonable results.

First, I had to figure out how to do this at all. I had seen a picture somewhere (I can't remember where or from whom) and wanted to try this for myself, but I didn't have internet yet and nobody in the photo studios could really help me. In the end, I found a light barrier at Elektronik Conrad which I used to fire a Metz Mecablitz flash (with the possibility to manually reduce the power to obtain a flash duration of less than 1/10000s), and built a setup with some Lego blocks on which I put a drop dispenser.

The next difficulty was to get the setup right with my analogue SLR in manual mode. Since I was using slide film, the procedure was to take some photos, note the flash position, distance, settings and the light barrier delay for each shot, then have the film developed, get it back a couple of days later and figure out how to improve my setup. You can imagine how tedious that was… So in the end, I didn't pursue it any further at that time.

However, the subject never left my mind completely, and when I got my first DSLR, I immediately started to figure out what was possible with today's gear. But that's on another page...



Impressum    Datenschutzerklärung                                                                                             © Martin Kögl, 2017