Oven Ready Glassware, or How a Pyrex Dish Nearly Drove Me Crazy
By Brian McDonald
30 March 2007
One old picture I have documents my six year old brother and two of our friends, the Falkenholm brothers, carrying a dead black snake over their shoulders. We had found the thing, dead, on the side of the road and i immediately ran home to grab my new Brownie and document our discovery in some sort of crass way. We lived in West Virginia at the time and killing dangerous animals was surpassed in the cool department only by the chewing of Red Horse loose leaf tobacco. Never mind it was a harmless black snake and it was dead. With a photo I could pose my brother and our friends with the snake as a trophy. Phillip Falkenholm grabbed the snake by the head and draped it over everyone's shoulders. He stuck his tongue out in a show of bravado and hunter-like arrogance at having defeated the world. John, his brother and my brother Beatty were somewhat less inclined to the pageantry and in such they played the part of the hunter's pack men. The picture was a perfect artifice and I was hooked on illusion.
Looking back at that and other photos from my childhood, I am continually overwhelmed by their restorative power. For me, those old photographs have an emotional momentum powerful enough to overcome the thirty years of intervening detritus and confusion and relocate me emotionally. Like a great book the narrative threads of photographs can launch us into other worlds, and thereby release us from the tyranny of reality. Imagination: great art, to me, inspires further and likewise great leaps of imagination.
Thirty years later I find myself in Boston lugging around a Digital-SLR and a heavy, man, it's heavy, motivation to create. I also find myself in a bar next to a drunk Italian painter. The guy's so drunk he's leaning against me, throwing his hands around, knocking my beer over, etc. I finally ask him to lay off and he tells me he's sorry, but he's leaving for Rome tomorrow to study painting, etc. and he's celebrating, maybe a bit too much. I tell him that's interesting, I'm an amateur photographer, what is his subject, his medium? The guy looks at me and laughs.
"Photography is not art," he says. "Photography is shit! Maybe Avedon, but Photography is not art." Nothing new here. I'd been over this ground in my mind hundreds of times.
In short order our little tete-a-tete derailed into a shouting match and we both ended up on the streets seemingly none the richer for the experience.
But I was touched enough to re-examine familiar questions.
Am i merely a voyeur?
Am I merely exploiting found greatness? Found innovation and creativity?
In short, am I involved in the creation of the world, a new perception of the world or am I stuck recording a well-known version of it?
I knew I wanted to create, but how?
Is my camera getting in the way of this goal rather than facilitating it?
I decided that, although the Italian painter may have indeed been incorrect about photography in general, he was correct about my photography. I felt no great connection to my photographs, no communicative force flowed through them.
Since then, and this is last October, I have sought to use photographic technology to greater express myself, as opposed to using photographic technology to greater document myself, the distinction being one of accountability.
I believe the documentarian is necessarily passive, he allows his subject to unfold and become before him. I feel the urge to create, to unfold a subject and imprint its emergence.
It is a narrow distinction, between documentation and creation, especially in the medium of photography, but it is a distinction keenly felt by myself.
To that end I have developed a technique which I believe to be entirely photographic yet which also allows me, as an artist, to enter more completely into the process and be more present and therefore totally accountable to the results.
What follows is a tutorial for utilizing this technique for your own expression. For me, the value of this process arises from its reliance on the imagination rather than any final product. I have found that once I am involved creatively with a process, that involvement becomes central to my everyday life. I begin thinking in terms of the process; what will work in the context of this process, what image will conjure such and such emotions, what image will be "In Focus," what image will fail to resolve. In this I have found a satisfactorily creative outlet. Further, i have found a way for myself to use my camera artistically. That last statement only applies to me. This is my way of producing photographic art. These images cannot be made without a camera, yet I feel that they do not rely too heavily on typical photographic techniques. In that sense they aspire to be innovative and creative and in that way they satisfy my need to create the world, rather than record it.
To make these shots you need a few things.
1. Camera and tripod. I use a Canon 300D - a 2003 Digital Rebel with an EFS 10-22mm lens. But, really, anything would work for this.
2. Pyrex dish. The lynch pin of the operation. It is glass so you can see through it. That said, you want a clean one, not many scratches or defects, although some waving in the glass makes for interesting textures in the shots. I went through several. Scratches, crashes and volume all becoming issues during the shoot. I use a 12" casserole dish.
3. Food Coloring. Standard food coloring found in any grocery store baking section. I primarily used blue and red, so buy the big bottles of those, if you can find them. Any color works, though.
4. Vellum. Available at any Art supply store. I used 17" X 10", I think. The sheet should be big enough to cover the dish.
5. Lights. I use two or three standard clip-on lights available at Home Depot for somewhere around three bucks. Buy some nice bulbs and you'll be set. I also employ a 50 bulb strand of Christmas lights.
6. Light stand and blanket. You need to get the lights hanging directly over the Pyrex dish, so they need to attach to something. I use an old boom microphone stand. The blanket drapes over the stand to enclose the set in a pseudo-studio of your own.
7. Kitchen chairs, or some such elevatory device. The Pyrex needs to be elevated to get the shots. I'll explain this later.
8. Duct Tape.
9. Imagination.
Step One: Wait until you have the house to yourself, or if you operate out of a studio, then just get started. I set everything up in my kitchen as I needed a ready supply of COLD water and space. In my apartment this means I need to use the kitchen.
Step Two: Clean your dish. Of vital importance. Your dish must be as clean as humanly possible before you shoot. Setup for one shot can be a bit tedious. If you get to your shot only to discover you've got dust particles floating through your environment you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Step Three: Elevate your Pyrex. We're going to be shooting from beneath the Pyrex, with the camera pointed up, so the dish needs to be suspended to allow for access to its underside. I use two kitchen chairs, placed back to back, and suspend the dish between their backs. Not safe, yes. Stupid maybe even, yes. In fact, a dish full of deep blue water slipped and shattered on our kitchen rug the night before Thanksgiving last year. Luckily the camera was out of the way. Luckily my fiancee still loves me. In any case, you'll need to suspend your dish about three feet off the ground and provide plenty of clearance for you to place your camera, on a tripod, underneath with a clear view up through the dish.
Step Four: Prepare your camera. OK, so you've got your dish up, clear and easy access to its underside, and your camera on a tripod at the ready. Slide the camera into place underneath the dish and frame a shot. Obviously you won't have much to shoot, but it's best to have initial framing complete before you set the actual shot.
Step Five: Prep your Vellum. Here's where the imagination comes in. You've got your basic setup, minus the lights, and now you need to decide what to shoot. The basic concept here is that you will be constructing a scene within the frame of the dish. Your vellum will rest on top of the Pyrex. Within the dish, you'll be creating the swirling colors with food coloring and cold water. So, your vellum is, in effect, a canvas. To achieve the figurative images for my compositions I typically print my photographs onto ordinary copy paper and then exacto the figures I want to use. Any image can be a resource, though. I also use toys, bottle caps, my own face, etc. Anything that can be placed on the vellum to create a well-defined silhouette is acceptable. Anything is acceptable. Recently I have been printing my images directly onto the Vellum and the results have been very good - clear and strong I think. Mainly, I concentrate on composition and subject. Once you've decided on and collected the elements of your scene, a collage of items in effect, tape the Vellum to the edges of the Pyrex with your duct tape (this will hold the vellum taut above the water) and arrange your scene. You want to prep the scene, frame it in the viewfinder, focus, etc. Basically you should finish everything up to the point of shooting in preparation for the step seven.. Once we hit step seven, time starts to slip away and the environment progresses towards monochrome, so readiness is paramount.
Step Six: Set your lights. So, you've got your scene organized, your camera focused and framed up, now we want to set our lighting. The lighting is, obviously, a very important aspect of capturing the nuances of the turbulence and the coloration of the dyed water in the dish. Basically, at this point, I just have my lights centered over the dish. I'll hang three for convenience, knowing I will most likely only use one, which I hang centered over the dish. This is my biggest light with the most coverage. My secondary and tertiary lights are smaller fill lights which I use should I need to fill in some areas of the shot. Again, this is prep work for the rapidly disappearing shot we are about to set in motion.
Step Seven: Apply the food coloring. So, here we go. Fill a pitcher with very cold water. Use ice if you want to to cool it down. Remove your scene from the vellum, and leave it arranged, or at hand for easy replacement back to the vellum. Peel the vellum from the Pyrex place it aside. Leave the duct tape hanging from the vellum as you'll need to re tape it for the shot. Grab a red dye. Squirt some into the dish. I experiment with different shapes and each shape yields differing results, so use your imagination. Once you've got the first dye down, grab the blue bottle and lay some of it down being careful to keep the two colors separate. Grab your pitcher of cold water and pour it into the Pyrex dish. Different angles of entry for the water will produce different patterns, so you'll be experimenting here, too. Fill up the dish enough to cover the base and then just a bit extra. We don't want the dyes to combine too quickly, which is why we use cold water and keep the levels low. So, get the bottom of the dish completely covered with water, then stop pouring.
Step Eight: Lights, vellum, blanket and shutter. Grab the vellum and reapply it to the top of the dish. Set your scene as you conceived it. Move the lights back into place. Give the lights power. Enclose your space. I use a blanket as a makeshift enclosure. The whole contraption becomes a sort of bellows camera. I find that enclosing it eliminates unwanted reflections against the bottom of the Pyrex. Further, the blanket seals the environment and gives me more control. Now slide underneath the dish and look up.
Step Nine: Refining Composition. You're under the dish. Look up. Amazing. If you've done it right, the colors should be striking. I'm addicted to this part of the process. Every shot is different and therefore surprising. If you're not seeing what you want, try adjusting your lights to enhance the shadow play amongst the colors. If everything seems monochromatic, then you may have over-poured your environment. Tear it down and repeat the process. If you're happy with your environment, then re-frame your shot, altering your figures and scene to capture the effect you have created most dramatically, take a light reading etc. and shoot.
Step Ten: Think. This process seems very open to artistic interpretation. Now that you know how to do it, all you have to do is conceive of scenes and/or interesting compositions which will exploit the technique.
Step Eleven: Repeat. Besides repetition, that is pretty much the process boiled down to its essence. Lighting, dyes used, camera type, scene created, vellum selection and artistic temperament are all variables which make this a rich environment for exploration. My hope is that I've inspired someone to experiment with his or her photography and discover a new process all their own. This seems to me to be the heartbeat of innovation and I am glad I could attempt to define mine.
More How To Stories
Thanks for letting us know!
Thanks for voicing your concerns. Rest assured, we take it seriously. We'll look into it and take any appropriate action.
