Three elements down, one to go

Second day of trying to come up with ideas to the coming week's Twitter Photo Challenge. The topic this time is Wind, Water, Fire, Earth. Strangely enough I find that topic a lot more abstract than it actually sounds.

Anyway, the basic idea I had today was to try to cram as many elements as possible into one picture. In this case water, air and earth. I had to use sparkling water to create the bubbles (air), and what you see here is the root of a flower complete with dirt (earth).

The only thing I think this photo proves is that sometimes maximalism is... too much. The idea was perhaps good enough, but the result reminds me more of the Facehuggers on glass in the laboratory scene in Aliens.

But I'm pleased with the exposure. Lighting glass isn't always easy, and here's the technical info for those who like to read the nerdy details:

Camera on tripod, manual exposure 1/200 f/36 to ensure maximum depth of field. Three flashes involved, one on-camera (no output) that controls two others. One Speedlite 430ex at manual 1/8 blasts the white background and ensures that that's real white *and* that the water and the bubbles are lit. That flash is only 20-30 centimeters from the background. A second Speedlite 550ex is handheld approx 1 meter from the glass, manual 1/1. All that ensured glass with visible content but little or no reflections on the surface. In Adobe Camera Raw I dialled in an extra +0,5 EV. (Even though the display on my EOS is big and beautiful, I still don't think it's easy to assess exposure on it)