That photo was the result of a YouTube video, a new camera lens, a week of constant photography, me looking through hundreds of pictures, and a call from the police.
I had the idea to take this photo from a YouTube video with a similar photo. That one was top down, so it didn't show the height of the metal very well. So I thought that I could take one from the side.
The first thing I had to figure out was my camera. I had a cheap (I'm lying) camera from Sony with the default lens. So I spent 800 RMB to buy a secondhand macro lens.
Because the displacement reaction was slow, I constantly photographed around 20 samples at 30-second intervals over a period of around a week or two, which gave me a couple hundred pictures. 90% of them were blurry and horrible. The other 10% was interesting. This one was the most interesting one.
This photo was of a piece of zinc submerged in a lead nitrate solution for a few hours. I tried things like silver nitrate but that did not work too well. (I also tried selling the silver I got from the reaction. That worked less well.)
And finally, about the police call...a while after we finished the police called and asked us why we were buying "chemicals". We told them it was in the name of science and they left us alone :)
