The Colour Red!!!

So Gizmodo.co.uk like to run the occasional Shooting Challenge.
Generally speaking I miss it or fail to get a shot done in time. This time is not much different except I was determined to get an entry in so... despite not having anything on the final day of entries i decided to give it a stab.

Now today I was in the office so I had the following amounts of time available.
13:00-14:00 lunch hour
17:00-18:00 Time between when I get home and the time submissions must be entered by.

So... 2 hours.

Here's the brief of what needed to be achieved:

For this week’s Shooting Challenge, I want you to make a photograph or series of photographs that focuses on the colour red. I’m looking for creative photographs that instantly draw the viewers to that colour. I don’t want to see any ‘selective colour’ photography as this usually requires some post­processing work and only minimal global post­processing is permitted.

I had a few basic ideas. I wasn't going to have too much time to experiment THAT much but I'd been thinking of grabbing some large black tiles to use as photographic backgrounds for a long while and this seemed like a good excuse.
I grabbed myself two black tiles, one very reflective one and one non-reflective one and a shiney red tile.
I looked for other materials whilst I was there but I had to head back to work.

So that was it. I got home at 17:00, dug out my cheapo studio lighting kit and shot away.
Here are those results.

 The above shot shows one of the problems I had along the way. Dust, lint and just... bits of stuff showed up very easily on the tiles. I spent a fair while wiping them down as even after I got them clear some dust would settle a bit later on.

 My son had left out his felt tip pens, in fact, namely just his red one which I took to be a sign.

After I'd finished with the tiles I had about ten minutes left before I had to get the photos off the camera and sent to Gizmodo.
Before I did  that though I really wanted to try an experiment using red food colouring dropped into water in a clear container.

I didn't submit any of these because they required far too much post-processing to get to how they are but they were an interesting 10-15 minute experiment.

The food colouring will just sink to the bottom of the water on it's own, you need to mix it with something thicker. On this occasion I used milk.

Finally just for fun I played with the Hue/Saturation and made it not red any more.

So there you go. With less than an hours worth of prep and a bit of determination this is the sort of thing you can spin out of your camera folks.