My first attempt at Smoke Photography

I decided to take a stab at it, let me know what you guys think. Particularly the one with the vase. I'm wondering if the vase needs more depth. Thanks.

 

very nice! i like the colours =)

 

Any explanation of the methods and set up?

 

Were you using Gel's for some of them?or just adjusting the contrast and hue?

 

Sorry it took me so long to reply back... busy week.

I wish I could say I owned some gels to play with, but I don't. Instead, as you said, I changed the Hue and Saturation levels in PS. Once you get the shots of the smoke with a black background, editing in PS is easy. It almost feels like cheating (to some, it probably is).

My setup. I've attached a diagram, but basically I taped some black poster board to the wall to use as a back drop. I used a printer box to put the incense on because it was the perfect height. For the vase, I put another piece of poster board underneath it to get the reflection.

I put the box and incense about 2 feet away from the backdrop, then placed a speedlight about 3 feet to the camera left of the incense. I also put another piece of poster board behind the speedlight so no light would spill onto the backdrop.

I put the camera about 2 feet away from the incense. I was using a Sigma 28mm f/2.8. I'm no expert, so the distances are not exact. You might have to play around with it to work for you. I shot mostly at 1/200 and set the speedlight to around 1/32 - 1/64. Again, something you can play with. I started my aperture to f10 and adjusted from there. Since I was using the Command Mode in my Nikon to fire the speedlight, I used a piece of cardboard to direct the flash to the left towards the speedlight but not let it fall on the smoke.

To focus, I turned the room light on, focused on the smoke, then turned the light off. Then I switched to manual focus, but it at least gave me a reference to work from. Since it was really hard to see the smoke through the finder, I just shot away and adjusted the focus based on what I saw on the LCD. That's why some of the pics are soft.

I think that's about it. I just whipped up those numbers mostly on memory, so take it with a grain of salt. The big thing is just to do it and play around with it.


smoke setup by growedup, on Flickr