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.

Violet did not start well. It’s the last picture I shot (before the “bonus” picture), and I felt I was getting at the end of what I could achieve on my theme. And…. it turns out that it’s my favorite for this round. I started by searching ideas for violet things on Google, and saw “amethyst” very early on. And hey, amethyst is significantly overrepresented in my tiny rock collection! So I started playing with my amethyst in various containers, moving water back and forth and being generally tired. I remember snapping this one because the lines of bubbles was uncommon – I still have no idea how that one happened, I thought there was a hair, but there wasn’t. I think that at that time there was mostly water, and the oil was mostly leftovers from surfaces and not really added per se. When I came back to my computer, I was very happy with what I was seeing – and particularly the fact that it was indeed sharp enough to use. I love how this looks like a starry night and/or a nebula, and I’m incredibly happy with this picture. The original image gives a better idea of the amethyst at the bottom!

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/125
ISO	800

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