This one came to me pretty quickly, really. The execution took a little bit of time, though.
I knew I wanted to use the magnetic balls that the kids had, but which ones? The large ones that Austin fiddles with at school would have easy enough, but they don’t stack well and have a random oil-slick finish that wouldn’t have photographed well anyway. So, that left me with the smaller magnets.
I really wanted to have 5 stacked perfectly vertically and have sixth askew, but it wasn’t physically possible. I tried to have a small arc that would lean to the side, but not touch the ground, but I would have needed 3 hands to position any more than 3 magnets and (frankly) I didn’t want to put that much work into it.
So I was left to work with 3 magnets and then it sorta worked itself out. They reflect surfaces from a 180 degree circumference, so they had to be placed in a tube of sorts. They needed to be resting on metal too, so the tube had to be very, very thin so that it could rest on the metal while the magnets could be placed inside the tube and still stay in place. A single layer of tissue paper did the trick. The scene would be lit from out side the tissue paper with a flashlight and the album cover of the new Liquid Tension Experiment album would serve as my back drop.
If I wanted to spend more time on it, I could have sat at the PC for a while and tried to eliminate the reflection of the camera lens from each magnet, but (frankly) this was more a proof-of-concept for me and I was under no delusion that I was creating a spectacular piece of art, so I was content with the image that I had straight out of camera with only a little crop adjustment and vignetting.
