Posts Tagged ‘photographing smoke’
The surreal beauty of smoke
Smoke is one of those subjects that I always thought made impressive pictures. There’s an appealing surreal randomness factor in smoke images, something that maybe a designer could create with a pen, but nothing like any other photographic subject could provide. A vivid imagination helps a lot with these images, it’s really like looking up at the clouds and realizing that some of them form recognizable shapes. Because of the randomness of these images it’s easier to play around with them too. Mirroring a smoke plume and adding it as a second layer in PS can create some almost magical results. All in all it’s a great way to create interesting fine art photography.
What hit me though is how simple photographing smoke actually is when using the right gear. First of all you need something to burn, incense sticks work fine, they burn slowly and give off a constant, thick plume of smoke which can easily be shaped using different objects. I guess other things would work but the best results I’ve gotten were with incense sticks. Get ones that don’t make you nauseous, you’ll be smelling that smoke for hours….
A uniform background is another part of the equation. Anything dark will work fine. I used a large sheet of black cardboard from a local art supply store but I guess a sheet of fabric would do fine too. A matte background should be used as you want to avoid reflections.
Lighting is key here. It’s simple but it has to be done right to avoid a lot of work in post. Both constant lighting and flash are used. The constant light helps to light up the smoke creating enough contrast between it and the background for the camera to focus right. The flash is there to stop motion. Both lights need do be trained on the smoke. Getting light directly into the lens will almost certainly produce lens flare, which is not something to be avoided as long as it fits within the creative vision. Either a snoot or barn doors can be easily created out of cardboard and added to the flash. A snoot is better suited if you’ll be focusing on a smaller vertical portion of the smoke as the light will be more focused. The barn doors I made were held in place with patches of velcro, making them easily adjustable.
As the flash is off the camera it will have to be triggered remotely. This gave me a chance to test for my new Elinchrom Skyport trigger in a real-life situation. Turns out it worked without a glitch even when shooting sequences at 6.5 images/sec. The trick here is to underpower the flash so that its recycle time will be able to keep up with the camera. So with the flash in manual mode, set the power to ½. To avoid light spill directly into the lens you can also zoom in the flash anywhere from 85mm to 105mm. If you’re shooting sequences then high-speed sync should be on too. Typically the flash can sync at 1/250th of a sec. To be on the safe side, with the camera set to manual mode you can set the shutter speed to one setting slower, so say 1/160th of a sec. I had no problems running the flash sync at 1/250th though; the Skyport trigger didn’t miss a beat.
To get the cleanest shot you should keep your ISO as low as possible. This shouldn’t be a problem as the amount of light that hits the smoke is controllable, you can always add more if you need to. The aperture should be set somewhere between f11 and f20. I was getting the best results at f18.
Smoke is rather unpredictable… you never really know what shape it will form, so shot a lot of frames and see what works best later on.
There is always a post-processing step, to get the right look and make the background uniform and smooth. The more contrast there is between the background and the smoke the easier it will be to correct the image. Then there’s the removal of little blemishes. The final step is to do something creative with the colors like invert the image or change the hue of the smoke. Smoke shots also work great when tiled like kaleidoscope images, mirrored in the y or x axis or rotated a certain number of degrees consecutively a few times.
So this is all it takes to kill an hour or two one lazy Sunday afternoon. The setup is simple but the images can be pretty moving. So try it for yourself….
My smoke shots are posted in my photoblog so check out the sidebar to the right.
