Illuminated Lava

Since yesterday's blip fell into the "waiting approval" trap, I decided to do an early morning blip for today.

My hippie side came out this morning while I captured my lava lamp in action. I tried many different approaches to this shot - underexposing, overexposing, and the thought of using HDR - but ended up settling on the one you see above, which involved the use of a flash while still keeping the room dark (the lava lamp was the only default light source).

HDR was out of the question since that is what put yesterday's blip in its cyber-limbo state - not an option. The other two methods gave me one extreme or the other - that of wax and liquid detail and not much else (the rest was black or near black) or blurred wax and extremely bright liquid with details on the wall, base, and dresser. By using the flash method, I was able to maintain the detail in the wax and liquid as well as the metallic sheen of the lamp's base and the reflections on the dresser. The downside to this approach is that I lose the lamp's scattered light pattern on the wall.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the result. Perhaps I can play around with the flash settings some to see if I can preserve all three elements of this shot, we'll see.