Oil and Water Photography | Equipment Explained [part 2]

Following on from yesterday's post, today I will be explaining why you need a clear glass coffee table, a spirit level, a flashgun, and some tissues for your oil and water photography. You can check out yesterday's post here to see the previous few items listed that you'll be needing just in case you missed that!

4. Clear Glass Coffee table

This is needed to place your clear glass container onto and needs to be glass in particular so that you can see through it to the coloured items that will be placed underneath. However, as you can see, I don't have a clear glass coffee table so I went with the next best thing, a couple of storage containers that I use to balance the bowl on by placing one either side of the bowl and then balancing it very carefully by the edges of the bowl, making sure i've got enough room underneath to place the colourful items underneath. It needs to be a fair distance from the colours you'll be placing underneath though so that they'll blur nicely creating the coloured background that you want. 

5. Spirit Level

This is an extremely useful piece of equipment to have to hand because it's vital that everything is in line/parallel with each other to maximise the depth of field and keep the focus even throughout the whole scene. It will also help you to keep your f stop as low as possible because if the lens is closer to one area than the other as that area may not blur enough and then you will need to increase your f stop which you may not be able to do in certain lighting condition so it's just easier to use one as low as you possibly can. 

6.Flashgun

It's also incredibly useful to have a flashgun, or some other form of external lighting, as you need an awful lot of light as you're going to be using fast shutter speeds so that you can remove any slight movement within the scene created by any motion within the water to keep all areas crisp within the frame and the colours as vibrant as possible.

7.Tissues

This isn't an essential item that you'll be needing it's just quite useful to have on stand-by incase you need to mop up any accidental spillages you may create. 

And that's it for today! Stay tuned tomorrow as I'll be discussing the next few items from the list :)

Thanks for reading!