Even though my focus is on travel and landscape photography, I've probably had more views and comments about the images in my Smoke Art gallery than from any of the other photos I've posted over the past fifteen years.
I became aware of this photographic technique back in 2012 after running across some of British photographer Graham Jeffrey's masterful smoke images, which you can view at www.sensitivelight.com. It's a pretty straightforward process to create these types of shots, but it does require a lot of trial and error before you end up with some usable photographs. You begin by setting up your camera on a tripod about three feet from a small table on which you place a stick (or several) of incense. Once you have the focus on the incense nice and sharp, you switch the camera to manual focus as the autofocus mode will have trouble locking in on the smoke. I've found using an f-stop of 11, ISO of 100, and shutter speed of 1/125 seems to work well.
Then approximately five feet behind the incense you set up a black background which will create a sharp contrast between it and the smoke. Next set up a remote flash several feet to the side or just behind the table with the incense as you want only the smoke to be illuminated. It's important to attach a snoot or use something like a piece of cardboard to block the light from the flash from leaking out and hitting the background. It also helps to be in a room without a lot of drafts or the smoke patterns become too unpredictable. Plus you'll want to clear the room periodically before the accumulated smoke starts to make the photos a bit hazy.
When the air is relatively still you can get some interesting vertical shots like the images below.
The stream of smoke tends to start out very narrow and expands the higher it rises. Play around with creating drafts from different angles to see how this changes the pattern of the smoke. You'll end up discarding most of your images but every once in a while you'll get something pretty interesting.
Once you load the images into your photo editing software and process them it's relatively easy to change the color of the smoke, or invert the background to white, but I prefer leaving it a more natural grayish blue so the focus of the viewer is drawn to the patterns of the smoke.
To view more of these images click on my Smoke Art gallery.
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