out of mind

Jan. 31, 2012 — A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some truly stunning photographs by German photographer Markus Reugels, part of his “Setup Liquid Art” series, depicting spherical representations of the Earth, Jupiter, and the moon, among other objects. The twist: they are “liquid planets,” comprised of a drop of water caught mid-fall.

And there’s no computer manipulation — these shots are real.

Reugels was kind enough to answer a few questions about his art via email. That’s how I learned that the father of two started doing photography seriously as a hobby around three years ago, initially just taking pictures as mementos for the family album. Soon he connected with the broader photography community, and became interested in taking pictures of “the beautiful things we are not able to see with our own eyes.”

Now, he lays parquet floors by day and works on his photography in his spare time. And his favorite medium is water. He dropped water onto various surfaces and figured out how to rig up a sensor-based trigger to his high-speed camera to capture its motion mid-splash, revealing all kinds of wonderful shapes that would otherwise not be visible to the human eye.

“Water can create beautiful shapes, but without high-speed photography we could never see them,” Reugels told the Daily Mail last year. (His shutter speed is a blistering one sixteen thousandth of a second.)

Reugels kept experimenting, first adding food coloring to the water and adding colored gels to his flashes to create an eerie glowing effect. Last year, in what he describes as a “personal milestone,” he figured out how to create “jumping spouts” so that the splashes were bigger, reaching between 3 cm to 15 cm in height. The secret? Adding sugar to the mix, along with a thickening agent (guar gum) to get even more bizarre shapes.

He got the inspiration for his “liquid planets” when he saw a photograph of Spiderman caught in a water drop. “I thought it would be great to place the Earth in a single drop,” he said. He used a satellite image of our pretty blue planet as a backdrop, and his high-speed camera setup captured the light refracting through the falling water drops. Voila! And then he extended the project to other planets, like Jupiter (above).

Of course, while the process seems simple, it’s far from easy. Everything has to come together at just the right moment, with just the right lighting, to create these photographs, and Reugel’s labor-intensive process requires a great deal of patience. While other photographers might boast fancier, more expensive equipment, he’s proud of what he’s been able to accomplish with his souped-up home apparatus and a boatload of creativity.

“The technical devices are only the key to bring your imagination into the pictures,” he says. We can’t wait to see what Reugels comes up with next.

—by Jennifer Ouellette