Smoke!

[manaheim]

C&C welcome. Someone posted a thread about some smoke pictures a couple days back, and I was thusly inspired. Here's one, I'm still playing with the pics.

==1==

 

[manaheim]

I kinda liked this one...

==2==

Thanks for looking.

 

[manaheim]

hmm... someone just pointed out my copyright date is off. Whoops. Guess I'll have to update my photoshop actions.

 

[manaheim]

Really? No reactions. Interesting.

 

[timethief]

I like the colors and textures. But not a big fan of smoke photos.

 

[Dagwood56]

I like them, cool forms. I especially like the blue version, very abstract, almost ghostly.

 

[mcuccia]

I like #2 better, tho I'd be inclined to crop it to the lower half.

Now that you can handle the technical side pretty good, it would be intersting if you could "shape" the smoke somehow (i.e. make circles).

Mel

 

[manaheim]

Thanks, all. I like #2 better as well, but I think that's mostly because I boosted the saturation and contrast up a bit and I didn't on the first one. I'm going to play a bit and see.

Mel- I saw one website where the guy was going hog-wild with the shaping and such. It was admittedly very cool, but it seemed it was pushing it a bit too much for me. I was thinking I might play a bit with different things that cause the smoke to move differently- spoons and whatnot, but kinda stop there. I already feel like I'm cheating just by coloring the smoke.

 

[TJ K]

Can you give me a little info on how you did this?

 

[manaheim]

Can you give me a little info on how you did this?

Absolutely... I realized after I did it that I should have taken a picture of the setup. Whoops.

I lit an incense stick and set it in front of a black background (in this case I actually had the incense stick sitting on a dining room chair and had a black T-shirt draped over the back of the chair)

I put my camera on a tripod with my 50mm 1.8 lens and pointed it at the smoke and framed it such that all the camera could see was the smoke and the black of the t-shirt.

I put my SB600 flash with a snoot on it to the left of the smoke and pointed it up and directly at the smoke. I set it up as a remote flash using my D300's commander mode to control it off-camera wirelessly. Note that very little (or none) of the flash was hitting the backdrop (a snoot is a tube over a flash that focuses the light in a fairly narrow beam towards the subject)

I had a remote shutter release cable on the D300.

I then (honestly, though this is kinda lame) stuck my hand where the smoke was and pressed the shutter release down part way to lock the focus. Then I removed my hand, let the smoke settle down a bit, and pushed the shutter the rest of the way to take the picture.

I was doing like F7/8 and 1/60th of a second or something on that order... manual exposure.

Then I brought the image into photoshop, did a bit of a boost on exposure or brightness to make it pop, sharpened it a HAIR, and then adjusted the Hue in the Hue/Saturation slider to add the color.

Thas' it.