Easy Way To Do Oil And Water Photography

These days, finding some unique and creative content online related to photography is very easy and simple.

Just go on Instagram or Pinterest and search for what you want to capture or create.

Photography has been gaining a lot of popularity over the last years, especially unique and different ones like oil and water photography, and macro water photography.

People are getting extremely creative nowadays. You might find the drops of oil on your dishes annoying but some photographers use those to their advantage.

Creative photography is all about discovering all new kinds of shapes, colors, and many other unique things.

There are many styles included in creative photography one of them being Abstract oil and water photography.

So today, In this article I’m sharing some easy ways to capture amazing Oil And Water Photography when you’re at your home.

Water and oil have properties that make them repel and attract each other at the same time. This allows us to design a new water abstract, made up of bubbles and colors.

You can create some colorful and inspiring images just by using water and oil bubble.

It’s very easy to capture some productive shots even during this COVID-19 period or whenever you’re feeling bored and want to do something cool with your camera.

You can capture different oil and water images just by following some simple steps.

Now, without talking more about it let’s get started with the steps…

Easy Way To Do Oil And Water Photography

So here are some ‘Ingredients’ which you need to do Oil and Water Photography at your home or wherever you’re.

The very first and most important thing which you need is a camera.

The second most important thing you will need are lenses like macro lenses.

You will also need transparent glass.

Once you find a good transparent glass then you’re in the game now.

After that, all you need is Oil and Water and if you want to make your images more colorful and abstract you can also add colors or some colorful material to your list of ingredients.

A tripod is also required but it is not a compulsion you can manually click pictures too if your hands are steady enough.

You will also need a spoon or a dropper to get the drops on the glass or any other surface without creating much of a mess.

Now once you have everything, you’re ready to shoot your images.

And do not forget a paper towel or a rag to clean the mess after you are done with a setup.

Now the steps to capture various oil and water photographs are listed below…

Setup for the shoot

Once you have transparent glass, on the surface of the glass add some water and oil drop by drop.

After adding the drops of oil and water mix these two elements together ( remember don’t add too much water and oil, it’ll create a lot of trouble for you).

You’ll see some sharp dots with many different dimensions.

Now it’s time to create some interesting effects.

Take your Ipad or any bigger size Smartphone and choose any colorful image.

If you don’t find any good colorful wallpapers then you can use gradient colors as well or any other colorful background you see fit.

10 Hours Gradient colors in Loop

After you find some colorful images, set your smartphone as shown in the picture below…

Source: DPS

Now you’re all set.

To capture the shot, you can use a tripod or your steady hands with a faster shutter speed to capture some sharp images.

Easy way to understand shutter speed for beginners

From the top of the glass, you can capture some outstanding and interesting shots of Oil and Water.

here are some cool example of oil and water photography…

These are the shots, which I found on the internet as an example of oil and water photography.

you can check out my attempt on Instagram I used one small acrylic glass so it’s very hard to focus on.

So I created a custom macro lens from my Prime 18-55mm lens. and everything works out as expected.

checkout 2-in-1 lens to perform better mobile photography

This is an easy and simple way to do Oil And Water Photography quickly and easily.

the cover photo was originally captured by David Clode on Unsplash, so thank you for that.

Choose the camera position and settings

After setting up the photography scene the next step will be to get a suitable angle and position for the image.

The settings of the camera can cause a little bit of a problem.

Using a macro lens or even an extension tube you can reduce the amount of light that reaches the camera’s sensor.

For the same reason, you will have to use a long exposure to get better results in your images.

Using a tripod is advisable as it gives you the freedom to manipulate your mixture on the transparent glass which helps you to get more unique images.

You can also switch to Live view mode. Live View Mode will make it easier to see what is going on in the glass than usual.

Also, use manual mode and an aperture around f/3.5 to make sure that you only focus on the oil circles and not on the backdrop object. Setting the ISO to 100 or 200 should be fine for your bubble macro photography. The shutter speed will depend on the lighting conditions.

To experiment more and more with your images you can always try to change the backdrop or even try to change the angle of the lens to get a different output.

Now the next step is post-processing.

Post-processing

Oil and water photographs do not require much post-processing as other photographs might.

You can use your usual post-processing apps or software with oil and water images as well to make small adjustments to your photos.

You can add some contrast, push the clarity, and play with the vibrance and saturation settings as well.

You can always experiment with various settings until you get your desired image and the final effect.

Conclusion

Oil and water photography is still gaining some momentum, but it is not yet as popular as other styles of creative photography.

If you have seen the oil and water photographs in the article above you will think it would be so difficult to create such a picture but in reality, it is quite simple.

You will find the whole process of creating such colorful and elegant pictures in the above article along with some suggestions.

Oil and water photography gives you a chance to experiment with your ideas and get creative in many new ways.

You can try Oil and water photography whenever it is not possible to shoot outside or you are too tired to do so. You only need a few ingredients and time

Hope you guys like this article, and learn something new and interesting today about a new kind of photography.

Thank you for spending your time on this article, comment below your best shots and questions if you’ve any, goodbye 🙂

About Author

Manthan

Hi, I'm Manthan I'm a professional photographer and founder of photographywith.com. this site hosts all of my writing on photography stuff like blogs, reviews, editing, and much more. whatever I learn new, I publish here as a blog with some good and easy examples. Cheers, Manthan

photographywithdc@gmail.com

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