From The Set Up To The Lens

So as you may or may not have seen I did a smoke photo shoot. In this blog I will go through the set up I used to create my smoke photos. First things first, setting up the studio. 

Below shows my basic set up, I pinned some black paper to the wall and some more black paper to the sideboard (to prevent too much light bouncing back). Placing some white card to the side of the flash gun to direct the light in one place.

To set up the smoke I placed an incense stick between a paper clip, balancing it on the top of a bottle and lit it up. 

Next I set up my camera setting, for this shoot my settings were 

1/160

F/9

ISO 100

Once I had picked out my setting I focused my lens and switched my lens to manual (just because I didn't want to keep re-focusing the camera as it wastes time) this kind of shoot usually would work best if you used a tripod, though I shot mine without one. If you don't use a tripod it just means you have to try and not move the camera around too much.

I had noticed that some of my photos gave the smoke a blue tint, this was not edited in and I didn't intend for it t happen. Though I am rather happy with how those photos turned out, my guess was that my camera caught the flash in the photo turning the smoke blue. I'm not sure why it happened but I did notice that every time the camera pointed slightly toward the flash gun the smoke came out blue in the photos.

A Blend of Two Colours

So after playing around in Photoshop with one of the smoke photos I came out with this. I kept the history and print-screened the process so you can see the steps I took.  

Most of the changes are brush tool and blending modes but the edit was quick and simple to do :) 

The Smell Of Smoke

 A couple of weeks back I set out to take some photos of smoke (these were a project set by a peer from my photography course). The photos were actually quite easy to set up and once everything starts going into swing it becomes rather fun to do as well. The only problem I had was trying to get the smoke to go in different directions, I used an incense stick to generate the smoke in these photos which is brilliant at constantly releasing smoke but sometimes you get the problem of the smoke just going up in a line. So to make more interesting patterns in the smoke I tried hoovering a piece of paper over the incense stick to let the smoke gather there and then pulled the paper away making the smoke go everywhere. Here are some of my images, I've kept these all unedited as I will do a blog with some edited photos later on.