Macro bubble photography tutorial: Creative ideas to do at home

[Music] in today's video I get created at home with a macro lens a single-speed light and some hypnotically psychedelic soap bubbles [Music] [Music] I'll show you how you two can get shots at home just like this [Music] [Music] so of course you're joining me in the studio I'm staying at home like everyone else and I'm sure like everyone else creativity is starting to wear a little thin so I was having to look around for some really really cool ideas or things I can do and I've always really liked macro and I've done a whole video on macro for nature on wildlife and had to get super cool close-up shots of insects and things in your garden but I thought it'd be quite interesting to do something inside and I had a look and I've seen across the internet various things about doing photographs of soap bubbles and you get all these cool swirling patterns and it really looked awesome I thought let's give that a go so you don't actually need a lot of kit to do this what you really need is a macro lens you need a big light source which I'll come to and you need a straw and some sort of soapy mixture so I'll start with the soapy mixture because this is the bit that I struggled the most with so obviously things like washing up liquid is going to be a really really great substance to use but using the washing up liquid by itself means you get quite weak bubbles and they pop very very easily it's quite difficult to do so what I've got here is this gross looking mixture which is mostly washing up liquid but I just tried adding a few other bits in here as well so what we've actually got is about a tablespoon of rapeseed oil just normal cooking rapeseed oil I'm sure the veg oil or olive oil would work I also put a dash of balsamic vinegar in just to turn it into a lovely dipping sauce for Bret I'm sure actually no as I accidentally use the wrong side of the straw to blow and it tastes absolutely foul which is not a surprise it does seem to have done the trick it is it is more hard-wearing as a as a mixture by which I mean the bubbles last longer so I can blow a big bubble and it stays around for maybe 20 seconds or so which is long enough to capture a few different shots and to make of course that you get your focus right I've got it just on a normal backdrop and I'm making the bubbles with a straw in an obvious way just by blowing into it there you go that's a big bubble on top and of course above me we've got the light source now I'm just going to be using a single speed light for this just a godox 8200 at the moment I've got an LED light just it's continuous for the video so I can actually show you what I'm doing but for most of the shots what I've done for this it's has been with flashes so very easy if you've got a a Canon speed light Nicanor a go ducks thing then you can easily do that you need a big light source so but it wraps around that bubble lights everything evenly doesn't need to be a big soft box you could use a scrim I've used a smaller strip box as well I just found that this one was the easiest and most convenient for me and particularly for doing video as well but experiment with what you've got you could be I'm sure you could use an umbrella or an maybe even just a big sheet pulled over basically anything big that really lights it up camera wise I'm just got my normal 5d 4 and I've got a hundred mil macro lens on the front now I've also got a extension tube on here which just lets you focus a little bit closer to the lens the setup itself is pretty straight forwards camera on a tripod get it nice and low see almost looking up at the bubble that emphasizes that whole feel of it being a planet makes a bubble seem a lot bigger than it really is and of course using a macro lens of the extension tubes you can get the lens really really really close to where the bubbles are in order to get close-up on those details to get the line to wrap around the bubble you need to get it nice and low pretty much as low as it can go without actually getting in the shot and obviously you just need to play around with your power settings on the light camera settings wise though I've been using the maximum sync speed of your camera which on this one is two hundredth of a second my aperture has been somewhere around f-14 to f-16 which is basically mean I'm using my light about full power because obviously that's quite a dark image so you're relying on having a lot of light being pumped out by your speed light the process of actually taking the shot is pretty straight forwards once you've got your camera and everything in place you get your straw squeeze your head under the light here we go got some bubbles get the camera into position hopefully a bubble will last long enough for you to slightly reframe and get your focus and then you take your shot the bottom is were getting your focus is there every time you create a new bubble it might be in a slightly different position in the little pool that you've created and so you will need to refocus each time because even a couple of millimeters back and forth using using any extension tubes like this it means it's going to be out of focus and it's super important that that swirling detail is pin-sharp let's try again do you remember to blow down the straw rather than suck in otherwise it's gross I found out this has been a real trial and error process you can create a bubble that doesn't last very long or it's in the wrong position or that the swirls don't really come out in quite the way you want them to or maybe you just don't get your focus in time I've probably taken 300 or so photos blow a bubble try and get the composition that you want focus take the shot and as you are focusing you'll notice all of those colors are really swirling around the textures change it goes from being a relatively form formless but lifeless bubble and then as the air around it starts to affect it everything swirls around so much more those colors become more vibrant and it just becomes a lot more interesting to photograph so it is worth once you've got your shot framed up keep on taking those photos so that you've got lots of different options of swirly patterns I do find as well that once the bubble starts to get towards the end of its life just before it bursts it starts to lose a lot of those colors and actually I don't know if it's just a mixture I've used but I tell I've found on mind that it almost goes into like a webbing you can literally see the holes starting to appear and then as their bubble bursts sort of bursts through these strands that look really really cool but I mean move my camera around as well getting in a bit closer trying to get just on those details and then backing it off trying to get the whole bubble and even tried to blow lots of smaller bubbles in there as well just to give a little bit more texture and you can help it alarm by just giving it a little little blow and as you do it starts to swirl even more shakes those covers up if you keep doing it too long it bursts because obviously the bubble dries out and you got to go create another one it's truly one of the great joys of doing anything in macro is that you just don't see things in this much detail normally it's a same thing I found when I was taking photos of insects in my previous video in that I didn't realize how how amazingly beautiful and complex and colourful some of these things actually were and this is just a bubble it's so basic we see them all the time you know you do your washing up there's billions of them in the bowl but seeing them in lighting them like this and getting to see the level of detail on them is amazing seeing all these swirls that I didn't know I didn't know happened I didn't know that it looked like this so again just a case of making more bubbles back to you camera quick reframe refocus and keep shooting it's of course important to actually have a look back at your pictures on the back of camera and just check that you have got the shots that you won have a zoom in just check that everything's in focus and that it's exposed just as you want it but have really found this to be such a good fun little experiment this is by no means my invention bubble photography has been around for some time I'm definitely not the first to do it I certainly won't be the last but it's been great fun in giving it a go when we've had so much downtime when creativity is starting to slide and I think it's just a great practice of how to use lighting how to do these sorts of things and the fact that you can get such amazing looking results at the end I think is really really exciting obviously there's no right or wrong way of doing this this is just how I've been trying to do it I've taken loads of different photos really looking forward to getting them over into Lightroom seeing what they look like so why don't we go and do that now so we've got our pictures over in Lightroom and honestly the biggest and most time-consuming process was actually just going through them all and getting rid of all the ones which were out of focus or I just didn't like or underexposed and the result is I've got now this nice collection of shots where the bubbles are vibrant they look gray I've done a lot of processing on these already but it's pretty basic processing that's if we just go and have a look for example at this shot here let's go ahead and right click and so I can show you what I've been doing I'm going to reset all of the edits as you can see it's it's all still there I haven't used any weird filters or anything too too difficult this is basically just lots of exposure tweaks so first up it is very dark so I'm going to ramp up that exposure and you can see it starts to go a little bit hazy and stuff so the things we're going to be leading on quite a lot d haze and clarity now normally in most parts of my photography whether it's cars portraits landscapes tend not to go too heavy on anything TI's but with this it's all about those bold colors that contrast so we want to basically ramp everything up make it super punchy super crisp and the D haze tool and the clarity tools are great ways of doing that as you can see as we start to move those sliders up these colors just start to get more saturated they start to pop more it is time to get a little bit darker so we're going to up that exposure even further and we're going to up the contrast we're going to up the whites we're going to bring down the highlights just a touch we're gonna bring that contrast back down a bit actually flick it on and off we can see just how much of a difference that has made if we zoom in we can receive a level of detail on there I'm not sure on this one my focus was exactly where I wanted it to be it's maybe there but the details are a little bit soft what we can do let's go down here and in the sharpening tool we can really amp up that sharpening because there's not lots of like fine detail in this it's more about those swirling patterns adding quite a bit of sharpening isn't going to make it look over sharp and if you did that on a portrait where you've got maybe eyelashes and different details on a person's face using the sharpening tool too much can look a little bit odd but I think actually it works quite well here I'm gonna add a little bit of noise reduction as well and that's we just held those details pop out a little bit more and it has there is very much the effect of over sharpening but I don't mind it too much here I'm gonna get the crop tool up I'm gonna straighten it up a little bit I just want these the middle for the lower third to sort of go in line with this band of color here almost as if that's the horizon on a planet and I'm gonna bring it in just to cut off that line of brightness on the bottom which I think was possibly the rim of the glass bowler that I was using don't want that I do like these other bubbles as foreground interest sort of helps make the big bubble seem even bigger because it's putting in Conte well here are some small bubbles and here's now this massive planet sized bubble in the background so what do you think that looks pretty cool but those bubbles in a in their foreground are a little bit too bright still so I'm going to bring up a graduated filter lower the exposure and we're going to bring that in just like that play around up the contrast a little bit and there we go and if we flick that on and off it's only what a few minutes of Edit tweaks and it's made such a difference you can play around a lot more play around with the with the color balance you can even change the hues if you want and get something even more psychedelic we could try using the brush tool to brush in additional contrast additional clarity in certain areas just to make it pop a little bit more might not be entirely necessary you'll know when you've gone too far with these because it will just look a little bit too much but I think shots like this can really stand to have a lot of contrast a lot of color because that's kind of the point of the shot it just makes it look like swirls of Paynes you wouldn't look at that and think oh yeah that's just a soap bubble it looks very very different and as you can see this is the same shot but I'm just taking it ever so slightly later and as a result those swirls have changed even more so I'm going to just paint in a little bit more light on these bump that exposure again but that contrast bring those shadows down up that Dee haze a little and up the clarity a bit more and again we've got something looking really really cool and as you flick through the other ones you'll see that you just got lots of different effects with this one I wanted again to emphasize that planet rising sort of thing so not only have I done various tweaks of exposure and the and their clarity but I've also brought in a nother filter a radial filter too dark and off this whole bottom half of this planet if we flick that on and off we can see that there's more detail down here but I've tried to make it darker to make almost like a crescent shape of the planet which I think looks pretty cool I love this one because this one we've got the bubbles in the foreground but the big bubble in the background is doing what I mentioned earlier I think in there as the bubbles start to get towards the end of their life as it were before they burst a lot of the actual I don't know if it's the water in the bubble starts to evaporate and it basically creates more of a webbing rather than a full bubble I don't know whether that's particularly down to there the sorts of mixture that I've used or if all bubbles do this but I love that in this shot we've got these full colorful bubbles in a foreground and this huge like rising bubble of just webbing and they barely even look connected the focus isn't amazing on it but if we look in close at that detail it's just fascinating I absolutely love doing this and again here this is just before it's gone - the webbing stage but a lot of that colour has started to go I haven't D saturated this at all as you can see vibrance and saturation both haven't been touched flick that on and off that straight out of camera and that's all we've done - this is basically black and white already if we take that saturation now it's just that slight blue hue I think that looks really really cool and as we flick through these we just get this psychedelic dream of effects going on in these bubbles I just love it I think this is amazing the great thing about this is that you can just do this at home just like I have done which is just taken a pot of bubbly mixture a straw a camera and a speedlight in a softbox and these are the results that you can get they are super creative they're super cool to try and they're just a hell of a lot of fun and at a time right now when you can't go outside you can't be going taking cool landscapes you can't be going out trying to find insects to do actual macro actual nature macro it's a really really interesting effect to try at home and it's probably quite a good learning tool of how to control light how to control your focus and to get these sorts of effects but yeah I'm really really pleased and I cannot encourage you stronger to go and give this a try if you have even a basic setup of tools if you don't have a macro lens you can get macro extension tubes I'm Amazon my extension tubes where I think something like 20 pounds maybe put that on your existing lens and you'll be able to focus much much closer so really really affordable way of giving this a try if you do want to try this I would love to see what results you get these do hit me up on Twitter with a battery HQ or Instagram also with a battery HQ let me know what sort of shots you can get but I do hope this video has been really useful and I hope it's given you some ideas of what to do to stay creative during the lockdown if you do like this video please hit the like button subscribe if you don't already and I will see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 10,473

Keywords: Macro, Photography, Tutorial, Bubble, Bubbles, Lightroom, Editing, How to, Tips, Tricks, Lighting, speedlite, Flashgun, Close up, Behind the scenes, Studio, At home

Id: Gzf88MQdhcc

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020