STEP BY STEP MAKE CREATIVE MULTI-COLOUR IMAGES
Stage your still-life so the lighting shows the moving elements, then take your shots and combine them with Blending Modes and simple channel manipulation
1 Get set up to shoot
For the best results, I placed my camera on a tripod and put a dark background behind the kettle, so it would help to show the steam being produced. Flash was my best option for lighting the scene, as it froze the boiling water in each shot. Using off-camera flash, I experimented with different shooting positions. I synced my flash speed as high as my camera allowed, and kept my ISO setting as low as possible to keep image noise levels at bay.
2 Take the set of shots
Once the kettle was boiling, I took some test shots to fine-tune my lighting, bearing in mind that I wanted to capture the water and also the steam coming from the kettle. Once I was happy with the lighting, I took several images in succession for editing together. For these images, I shot raw files for optimum image quality, and used a shutter speed of 1/200 sec at f/5.6. The 50mm lens on my medium-format camera equates to about 40mm in full-frame terms.
3 Blend the images
Selecting at least three images, I opened them as separate layers in Photoshop and changed the Blending Mode from Normal to Lighten. I right-clicked the first layer and selected Blending Options to open the Layer Styles dialog box. In the Advanced Blending panel, I unticked the G and B channels for the first layer, leaving just the R channel ticked. For the next layer, I repeated this but left just G ticked; I repeated this for the third layer, leaving only B ticked.
4 Add a fun effect with a fourth layer
For the main image (above) I added a fourth layer from another image into the sequence of shots. Setting this layer as an additional blue channel, it mixed with the other layers to create some yellow in the water and the steam. The image of the boats (inset, above) is another example of using the red, green and blue channels for three different shots, brought together in Photoshop layers. The gently moving water has produced red, green and blue displacement in each shot.