Smoke Photography #2 (this time with speedlight)

After last weeks attempt at smoke photography involving complicated juggling of phone, desk lamp and snood (paper tube to direct the light and stop it lighting the background too) I borrowed a speed light and managed a slightly better set up!

Black paper background, incense cone, speedlight with snood, camera (canon 1100D) and tripod. I had the camera set to manual focus and set the focus using my hand held just above the incense cone. This meant MOST of the shots had pretty prefect focus on them.

The photographs were all taken at either ISO 100, 200, 400. I managed to take 146 as I found that putting the camera on ‘continuous’ meant that I could get a burst of shots when a particularly interesting spiral of smoke happened.

I tried to direct the smoke by creating small drafts in different places around the incense cone which worked really well to get tall spirals, curls and intricate clouds although had to keep the smoke blowing gently side to side as the camera being set to manual too much forwards or backwards and I’d loose the definition.

These are my favorites.

f/8   Exp 1/1600   ISO 400

f/8    Exp 1/160  ISO 400

f/8  Exp 1/250   ISO 200

f/8   Exp 1/250   ISO 200

f/8    Exp 1/320   ISO 400

f/8    Exp 1/320   ISO 400

 Once I had the shots I played around with them in Photoshop a little and by inverting them and playing with the colour through the curves short cut I really like these outcomes.

These remind me of x-rays a little, and I love the subtle colours that come through.

 

Pure invert and another were I have played with the colours through curves.

Hope you like what I have done here – I’m working on another idea at the moment with the smoke photographs but if you have any ideas for what I could do next with them – techniques to try out etc – please do comment and let me know, I’m really enjoying the learning process and the experimentation.