Smoke Photography

[Gotoplanf]

I had seen many great smoke photography pics surfacing all over the place and spent a weekend with various setups to get a few decent pics. i like them very much and intend on getting the setup just right after Christmas and spending a few more hours in the smoke.

[Bambi]

these are so cool. How do you do them?

[Gotoplanf]

these are so cool. How do you do them?

Well, I am no pro at them, however from various online sources and just plain ol' playing around with lighting, I discovered the way that works best for me. There are possibly many ways to do it. However I used a nikon camera with a tokina wide angle lens set at between f8 and f11, with a shutter of 1/125 and faster and iso 100. I used a SB600 attached with a cable to the hot shoe on a tripod to the right with a homemade snoot/grid contraption, white reflector on the left and black backdrop. With the flash i played with many settings to get different effects. From there i placed an incence stick in the middle of that mess and snapped away in a dimly lit room. it requires some patience, luck and manual manipulation of the smoke, i used a spoon my breath, and anything that would disturb the smoke, to get good shots, but it gets cold in Edmonton, so staying inside isn't always bad. From there I would take the files into photoshop and play with hue saturations, levels, curves and inverting to get a desired effect.. Like I say this is what worked for me. I am gonna tweak this setup just before the new year and see what effects I can get.

[Marko]

cool results you got there goto I really like shots 1 and 3 here!!
Just curious, how much post processing went into these?

In case anyone is interested...we did a podcast on this a while back
56 – How to photograph smoke – Photography podcast (http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=155)

thx - Marko

[Gotoplanf]

cool results you got there goto I really like shots 1 and 3 here!!
Just curious, how much post processing went into these?

In case anyone is interested...we did a podcast on this a while back
56 – How to photograph smoke – Photography podcast (http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=155)

thx - Marko

Actually 2 and 3 were very little just an invert, and hue saturation on 2, an invert and hue saturation, with a mirror image copied to the side on 3. number 1 i cleaned a bit of the excess smoke away from the sides of the stem and then just colorized on two separate layers. The shapes of all the smoke were more or less as they came into the camera. Probably no more than 5 mins per picture....Just listened to the podcast after seeing that link, great podcast by the way, Like i say just found out about the podcasts a few weeks back so I hadn't made it to that number yet. Would have probably cut a few hours off the original setups...LOL

[Marko]

Cool - Thx for the info!
yeah that was a fun podcast to record last year, smoke photography is always fun because you never really know what shapes the smoke will create. :)

[Bambi]

cool results you got there goto I really like shots 1 and 3 here!!
Just curious, how much post processing went into these?

In case anyone is interested...we did a podcast on this a while back
56 – How to photograph smoke – Photography podcast (http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=155)

thx - Marko


thanks for the explanation planf, it sounds like fun to try.

Marko, I will be listening to this podcast next. :)

[sarrasani]

very very interesting and good images.