The 35th Scavenger Hunt had a very colorful theme, because there’s all colors of the rainbow in it, and then some. It took me a while to manage to find a way to get a set of pictures that would look like a proper set. My first idea was to try to do something around food photography; some of the colors dissuaded me. I finally landed on the idea of doing something I had wanted to do for a long time: playing with water and oil and soap to make BUBBLES. Not all the pictures have all these components, but I tried to keep a uniting “bubbles/droplets” theme while trying to provide some variation on the technique to get cohesive, but different images.

For Red, I wanted to see if the color of the liquid made a difference, and what results I could get with a lot of water and no soap to break the oil puddles. I shot over a red t-shirt, and my water had some Campari in it. I don’t think that the color made much difference – if anything, mayyybe in the fact that the bubbles were also red instead of picking the light from the outside, but there’s, at best, weak evidence of that.

The bubbles I liked were very close to the border of the dish, which meant that my edits were somewhat heavy-handed; at the end of the day, I quite like the arc that I managed to get there, it helps selling a planet/sun/space feeling, which was what I was trying to go for with that edit. It still feels like one of the weakest shot of the series – but there had to be one!

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/4.5
Exposure time	1/200
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Red album.