More Smoke

Portal

I've been occupied this week with researching starting up a business. Lot's of stuff to think about. I don't know if I'm up for the leap yet, but I've got to do something.

Anyway, here are are a couple more smoke images from last weekend. Hope you enjoy them a much as I did making them.

More after the jump.

Rising



Nymphs

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Dig that Groovy Flow

Flow

Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Know what I mean?

Today's image is one of the images from my session of smoke photography this past weekend. The smoke was photographed the same as I mentioned in yesterday's post. The processing was just a tad different. First I obviously didn't mirror it in this one. I liked the smooth texture and thought that it was strong enough on it's own. Second, I inverted the colors after adding the gradient. This caused the black background to turn white as well as inverting the color gradient. I think it makes for a nice, abstract presentation for this image.

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Success!

Valentine Dancers

It did rain all weekend like the forecasts said it would. However, I did set up the tabletop "studio" for some smoke photography like I mentioned on Friday. For the smoke source I used a Patchouli incense stick. Those give a nice, thin stream of smoke that you can then deform into shapes and swirls with a light puff of air or snapping your finger close to it. The base images were taken with the camera on a tripod and focused onto the tip of the incense stick. It can be difficult to focus on the smoke as you have to do this sort of photography in a fairly dark room. One of my flashes was off to the left of the camera with a snoot to restrict the light to just the area of the smoke and to keep it from causing lens flare. The flash was also flagged to prevent light from spilling on to the background; although I did still have some problems with that from time to time. I used a black, three fold "project" board for my background. This gave me the contrast needed to see the smoke in the image.

More after the jump.

The final images were processed initially in Lightroom 2 for basic tone, white balance, and camera calibration. Generally this amounted to setting the camera calibration to "Camera Standard", setting a custom white balance, and increasing the black point to make sure the background was actually black. Next I took the images into Photoshop CS4. I applied a colored gradient to the smoke. Then I just played around with mirroring the smoke so that it formed various patterns until I got something I liked.

I'm pretty happy with my results. The exercise did what I wanted it to do. It got the camera back in my hands and spurred some creative thinking. The Photoshop work was particularly good for me as I haven't used it enough yet to be comfortable with it's features. I will admit I had to have a couple of my Photoshop books on the desk to help me with some of the initial layering and mirroring. Once I figured it out though, it really wasn't too difficult. Which made the subsequent images really fun to do.

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Dancer

Dancer

The shot above is a photograph of smoke rising from a stick of incense. I took it when I was first starting to experiment with my camera and flash. The colors were added via post processing in Adobe Photoshop Elements at the time.

Since it looks like the weather is going to keep us inside this weekend, I think I'll work on some more of these smoke images. They really are not very difficult to set-up and make. Plus, it is kind of fun as you can never predict what you will get. The best thing is that doing them has rekindled a spark again.

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Smooth

Smooth

Today's photograph is from a set of smoke images. This is a really fun little project to do. First find an area that you can make as dark as possible. Set up a black background; I used a black, three fold project board like you would use for a science fair display. You can get project boards at any craft store in a variety of colors. They make handy backgrounds for table-top subjects and are easy to store. Put your camera on a tripod or other firm support. Place some incense or smokey candle on the table with the background. Make sure the incense is not right up against the background because you don't want light spilling on to the background. Place a flash to one side of the incense with a gobo/flag to block light from hitting the background. Line the flash up with the incense/candle. Light the incense/candle, manually focus your camera where the smoke is and use an apeture to give you a deep enough depth of field to make sure that the smoke is in focus whereever it meanders. An apeture of f/5.6 to F/8 should be good. Your shutter speeds should be set within your flash's synch speed. You can us a long shutter speed if you want, but remember that the smoke is going to be frozen by the flash.
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Now all you need to do is to turn the lights out and start taking photographs. I remote trigger is useful for this; I use the IR remote for my camera. You can use a wired manual release if you have one, or the shutter button with the exposure delay function turned on. You might need to fine tune the exposure at first. Simply increase or decrease the apeture until you like what you see in your viewfinder. Then release the shutter whenever you see an interesting pattern in the smoke. If the smoke is too smooth or not interesting enough, disturb the air near it by blowing lighting, snapping your fingers, clapping, anything to add a touch of turbulence to the air. Don't be surprised if you get mezmerised by the smoke patterns and take a couple of hundred photographs. It is such an interesting dynamic that you are capturing, and it will be infinitely varible.

After you have finished taking the photographs, bring them into your image processing software of choice. Adjust the black point using Levels and Curves to blank out the background if any light managed to get on it. You can then apply color to it by using a gradient layer and playing around with the layer blending modes to get the look that you want.

I hope you enjoy the making your own smoking photographs. I can be a lot of fun and isn't very difficult.


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