Have a splash of coffee!

So one of the blogs I follow had a tutorial awhile back on how to photograph a drink splash.  I loved the tutorial, but was so busy I forgot to try it until today.  Her splash looks much better than mine, and I will be doing this again when I'm more prepared for it.  I was just feeling the creativeness today.  Here is the link from the photographer I got the idea from along with the directions on how she did it!
http://www.crispphotoworks.com/food-photography-coffee-splash/

 And here is my photo!

I was enjoying a cup of coffee and cake when I remembered the tutorial, so I used what I had!  I think next time I do this I will use black coffee and I'm not happy with how shadowed mine looks.  I do love the shadow created by using the window for my lighting.  I did get to use my new reflectors to keep the shadow from being to dramatic. Also I added a texture overlay to give it that extra detail.  Most of what I used was from CoffeeShopBlog which I talked about in my last post, so if you didn't see that one check it out! 

The how to for this is explained in the link, but I'll post a short version.  Basically what I did was I practiced the splash with a cup of water.  I took some hard candy (the only thing I had on hand here at the house was a mentos) and dropped or threw it in the water.  I had to practice getting the right amount of splash because just dropping it didn't give me enough of a splash, but to hard made it look weird.  Then once I knew I had the right amount of force, I set up the cup saucer and cake.  I took that picture so I had a base to work with then I removed the cake.  I took my mentos and tossed it in while snapping my shots continuously. Keeping the camera on continuous allows you to get step by step pictures of the splash so you can capture that perfect time.  If you just do it one picture at a time then you run the risk of getting the picture to early or late.  Once I had my images, I uploaded them into photoshop.  I found the best splash (in this case I have two splash images combined into one) and put them with my base photo.  I then masked what I wanted showing and what I wanted hidden.  There were lots of little random splashes I removed because it made the image look chaotic.  Once all of my images were merged I edited it to my liking and added a texture.  TaDa! Beautiful!