Smoke Art
01st August 2008
Here's a quick guide to the way this shot was created.
I’ve always been interested in smoke shots, so when I found this tutorial http://www.photocritic.org/2007/artsmoke-photographing-smoke/ I had no more excuses not to try it. This shot was one of 10 I got, (10 from 15 using flash) and the fluke that it looks like a pair of stockinged legs means I’m going to have a hard time topping it – so it may be the first and last smoke shot I try!
Setup
The basics you need are a darkened room with a black backdrop, a bright lamp or preferably a flash gun to use held off camera, some incense and patience.
Having taken close to 700 shots using a 500w lamp with little success (not enough light) I realised I had my Dad’s old flash gun and that solved my problem, enough light to make the smoke stand out, and a short enough exposure to freeze the motion.
For the backdrop I used a black jacket pegged to my motorbike handlebars, blacked out the garage window with an old curtain and fired the flash handheld from the side and below at incense smoke with the camera on a slow shutter. Using the self -timer to gives you time to position the flash after pressing the shutter.
The camera was on my tripod, the incense stick was in a blob of blu-tack on top of a 2 litre coke bottle top on the garage floor, I use whatever is to hand, doesn’t matter, and I’m always in a hurry to see the shots! Oh and I also put a nice piece of carpet behind the tripod… so I could kneel in comfort whilst framing.
I used my 18-70mm lens focused on the tip of incense stick with the camera angled on the tripod so the smoke travelled diagonally across the frame. Shutter speed of 1.6 seconds, ISO200 and f8 for a balance between exposure and dof seemed to work fine.
Fire the shutter, once it opens fire the flash and see what you got. Try disturbing the flow gently before the shutter opens to get different effects.
Post-processing
I use CS3 but I'm sure whatever you have will get you there. Pick out your best ones, crop them for effect, don’t worry too much about ultra sharpness, it’s OK to have areas of fuzziness…it’s smoke!
Set the levels using the black and white droppers, black first so you get a clean black background, then pick a slightly grey area with the white so it boosts the levels a little and that’s stage one. Save this image as it’s your master copy and always save the originals as well so you can get back to square one if you need to.
Next hit, Image, Adjustments, Invert ,and you’ll get a white background with brown smoke.
At this point any flaws in the background become obvious and can be cloned, healed or painted out to clean things up. Also cleanup any smoke particles floating around using the healing brush or clone tool.
Now for the colours. Hit, Image, Adustments, Colour Balance, and play around with the sliders till you’re happy, no rules here.
If you want to put multiple colours on an image as above, just use the lasso tool set to feather 100pixels or so before using the colour balance tool on the selected areas so they blend with each other and your done! Try inverting that next to see what happens and don’t forget to save every one separately so you don’t lose the good ones.
Here's another version, same shot but painted out the right side in response to a Flickr member comment about a woman being in the shot. I hadn't noticed her till that point but here she is.
Have fun, experiment and feel free to ask any questions.
Chris
