[ksten]

Hi,

My first properly free evening for quite a while now so thought I'd indulge myself in a bit of photography. I decided to have a go at "smoke art". This is where you burn something, in my case an incense stick, and take photographs of the smoke produced.

My technique was to have quite a dark room, set my camera to a 1/250th and a medium to small aperture. I sidelit the smoke using a home made grid spot over my off-camera flash. I shot against a black background (A3 black card) but the ambient lighting at these settings was pretty much black anyway so I'm not sure it was needed.

Then I just lit the incense stick and wafted the smoke from time to time and waited for something interesting to happen!

Here were the three most interesting (Clickable for larger versions & exif):

Flame

Good

Evil

Edit: forgot to say, PP included RAW processing and cropping in lightroom followed by dodging/burning and selectively "colourising" areas using hue/saturation layers with masks.

C&C appreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Cheers.

[allie_c]

Great shots..love all three.

[bowenjones]

Excellent work Keith
All three are great but the middle one is quite superb.

[Triggaaar]

Excellent stuff, thanks.

The second picture is like an impression of John Merrick

[Beachball]

Like them all. #2 if I had to pick one tho.

[Tobers]

#2 looks like a person with a big nose. All very good - nice technique and smells good too.

[Liquid101]

Yes, very interesting and well executed.

#2 looks a little like Alfred Hitchcock

[electrolyte]

Superb shots. #1 and #2 are my faves. Well done, time well spent!

[cedmondson]

Impressive stuff. I think I like the symmetry of #1 best. Your 'how to' notes are appreciated too - I'm tempted to try this myself sometime. Any more info on the homemade grid spot?

[ksten]

Many thanks for your comments everyone.

Originally Posted by cedmondson

Any more info on the homemade grid spot?

Details of home made lighting modifiers in general are here.

The grid spot in particular is here, here and here.

A flickr group related to this sort of thing here.

Cheers.

[Zone]

Did some of these incense stick smoke jobbies a few years back, they were all the rage on epz at the time

#1 is excellent

[Paranormalist]

Impressive all right!

[GarryF]

great shots, all 3 are excellent to me, they'd make nice wallpapers in landscape mode?

[Dazza96]

Those are excellent

[ush flynn]

awesome! and the Alfred Hitchcock comment was spot on! If that was an image of Jesus you could have got it in the papers!

[Torpedo]

All are fantastic, but as said above, #2 is the pick of the bunch.

[T0MAT01]

The first one is incredible! Really well done Keith, nicely pp'd too.

[g852]

#2 just grabs you, but i think i prefer #3
the more you look at it the more you see - to me looks almost as if it's a 'phoenix rising from the ashes' with it's neck and head bent downwards, ready to rise - impressive.

[Holowlegs]

Great work, #1 is very good.


Cheers Holo

[jamesbryan17]

Holy **** they are amazing

[ksten]

Thanks for your comments everyone.

Cheers.

[iamnotbanksy]

i like the curls on the first picture...mind you they all look good

[SweetGirl]

WOW....these are great....
No....2 has to be my favourite....