Acrylic paint spreads through water during an experimental shoot, Friday, March 16, 2012.

East Chicago, Indiana-based photographer, videographer and lighting technician Guy Rhodes took on a personal project and experimented with acrylic paint being poured into water.

Sometimes, when people ask what I do for a living, I respond, “I get paid to play with my toys.” And, while I’m sincere in this credo, the toys are often in use to realize a client’s vision, or to complete a client’s project. It’s not frequent that I have the time to take on a personal, just-for-fun project, even though there’s tons of ideas swimming around in my brain at any given moment. Unfortunately, many of those ideas would amount to long-term projects that my schedule just won’t accommodate.

Yesterday, my friend and fellow photographer Taylor Irby shot me a link to some fascinating portraits of ink being poured into water. I was stunned at the simplicity of what was going on in the images from a technical standpoint, contrasted with the beautiful complexity of the lines the ink was creating as it flowed through the water. I immediately knew I had to try this for myself, and I was thrilled that I had a fun project on the table – just-for-fun – that would only take a couple of hours.

Continue reading and see more photos of this experimental shoot on Guy’s blog.

Here’s the setup for the color paint pours. The aquarium was backlit with an Elinchrom Style 600 strobe at about half power, placed inside a Photoflex medium softbox. To the left of the aquarium was a Vivitar 285HV flash set to 1/4 power, and below, another Vivitar set to 1/2 power. To the right of the aquarium, I placed a piece of white card stock for fill. The images were shot with a Canon 1D Mark IV with a 50mm f1.2 lens. My base exposure was 1/250th @ f16 @ 50 ISO.

I came up with this high-tech rig to allow me to pour two colors of paint simultaneously with one hand (since my other hand was operating the cable release for the camera).

The resulting pour. I flipped this one 180 degrees as with most of the others.

Tornado.