Maximum colours

Use sweets, fruits and paper to get vibrant shots at home

15 Get creative with coloured sheets of A4 paper

Fantastic pictures can be had with just basic household items and you can get these colourful abstract shots by curling up strips of coloured card or paper. Firstly, you’ll need to get an assortment of coloured paper, we used seven sheets to create enough curls and then staggered them and loosely folded them back on themselves to create the loops. Then secure them in place with a staple or a peg, we used a small weight that we had to hand. You’ll also want to cut the A4 sheets down so they’re only a few inches wide, this will make it much easier for the flash light to travel through. Get a tight composition with a zoom or macro lens and set up your flash with some triggers off-camera, just behind the paper curls. Take the shot to fire the flash light through the gaps in the paper, creating this artistic abstract shot.

14 Hit the ‘sweet’ spot

You can get abstract images using colourful sweets. Put down a sheet of paper and carefully place your sweets on it, we put them in rows of their colour, but you could also just randomly mix them up. We then used a sheet of glass from an A4 picture frame and propped this up with some cardboard tube from an old cling film pack, cut into four equal posts for the glass to rest on above the sweets. We then used a pipette to add water drops on the glass and focused on these with a macro lens, creating this abstract result.

16 Use flash and make a splash

We’re probably paying a bit more attention to the food we’re eating currently and trying to be a bit healthier, so it’s likely you may have some colourful fruit like strawberries, cherries, limes or lemons in the house. For this shot you’re going to drop a piece of fruit into a glass of water and freeze the moment the water splashes up using some off-camera flash. The resulting shot is crisp, full of colour and summery, so give it a try.