Smoke Photography

"Magic Beanstalk"

I've been meaning to try out photography for a while, and last weekend I gave it a shot. There are many tutorials on the Internet, but the basic steps I followed were as follows:

1) Set up in a place with a dark background. A black background isn't necessary, but a dark background helps.

2) Set up your off-camera flash towards the side and slightly behind. Zoom in to your maximum zoom setting on the flash - I used the 105mm setting on mine. Position the flash so that it lights the smoke and. I used just the one flash and no reflector. Some tutorials I saw suggested using a snoot on the flash, but I found that with the flash head zoomed in and the flash angled away from the background it wasn't really necessary. You can add color in post, but colored gels on your flash also works.

3) I used incense for the smoke - it works well.

4) We want to let the background go completely black, so use your highest sync speed and an aperture of f/8 or so to maximize depth of field.

5) Use manual focus and pre-focus on where the smoke will be.

6) Light up the incense and fire away! The smoke shapes are going to be random so take lots of exposures.

7) Post-processing can include removing some of the smoke trails, contrast and adding color. Composites are also fun!

Here's a link to some of the results!

"Fighting His Demons"

The Endless Pour (Cinemagraph)

Lately I've been playing with Cinemagraphs - living photos which introduce a limited amount of movement into a still picture. Done well these can be very effective in bringing an extra dimension into a still image. (Like HDR, when overdone the results can be disastrous!)

I've been  using Flixel Cinemagraph Pro, a tool designed specifically for creating Cinemagraphs, though there are several ways of making them including using Photoshop. Cinemagraph Pro makes it fairly easy. You start with a video clip, select the part of the clip to use, choose a still frame and create a mask to show where the motion in the video will show. (You can even export the still frame, edit in any image editor and reimport.)

As you can see from the example above I've been having fun playing around with Cinemagraphs, and will be exploring them further!