The Story Behind the Photo
May 2024: Splash
“Dancing Paint” Doug Budzynski
Dancing Paint
How I did it.
The Dancing Paint idea was something I had been interested in trying for several years, after I had stumbled upon a Youtube video. So, the Splash theme seemed like a good time to try it. I looked for Youtube videos of how people had done this in the past and though I did not find many, the common theme was to use an old subwoofer speaker. Luckily, I happened to have one. Advice, don’t expect to use it as a regular speaker again.
The first thing I did was take the speaker cover off and cover the speaker with a piece of black plastic (garbage bag), making sure the plastic was right on the speaker and as taught as possible. I wanted everything black except the paint. The paint is just hobby acrylic paint. I chose bright colors and even some fluorescent colors, though I didn’t see any real difference between the typical bright and fluorescent colors in my results. As for the paint thickness, I tried different thicknesses; Straight from the bottle to a 2:1 ratio of water and paint. I concluded that 1:1 ratio of water and paint was the best, but keeping each one slightly different gave a different results to the same vibration of the speaker.
Make it stand out
To make the subwoofer vibration most effective, I found a suggestion to use a 60Hz amplified sound with the speaker. However, I felt my results were kind on a flat side. So, I found, free on the internet, some bass sound samples that people use with their creation of rapping music. You know that sound you hear someone’s car that pulls up next to you and it feels like their car is vibrating so much you can feel it in your own car. Using Apple’s GarageBand App, I created some tracks with those samples and plugged the subwoofer into the computer.
The setup was pretty straight forward. I placed speaker in front of a black backdrop with speedlights on each side of the speaker for the lighting, in a dark room. I had the speedlights set to 1/32 power for two reasons. One is to have a very short time duration of the light for freezing the action. The second was to allow my camera to shoot several frames fast before the speedlight couldn’t keep up with the camera’s frame rate anymore. This usually lasted only a few seconds. But that’s all you needed to get the best shots of the paint bouncing around before it didn’t look very desirable, because it starts to mix together and looking brown.