Tsunami - Art Smoke

[kunaldaswani]

Any suggestions on how to improve photographing smoke ?

Tsunami



Looking for title, any suggestions

[Nicole]

No suggestions here, I'm dying to learn how to do this. I've tried, but with essentially no success I'd love to hear how you managed to do the actual photographing of the smoke.

[kunaldaswani]

Originally Posted by Nicole

No suggestions here, I'm dying to learn how to do this. I've tried, but with essentially no success I'd love to hear how you managed to do the actual photographing of the smoke.

If you like, I will take a picture of my set up and explain how i shot this. I"m jus a beginner but willing to share the little that i know.

If you haven't already please go thro this link:

http://www.photocritic.org/2007/arts...raphing-smoke/

Cheers!

Kunal

[Nicole]

I have seen that link actually Great article. I figure that I'm just doing something wrong in my shots

I'd love to see a picture of your set-up and an explanation of how you shot it. And I'm sure lots of other people here would as well.

[kunaldaswani]

I will shoot my set up when i get back home tonight but here are discussion groups which i found helpful.

This one is with a picture of the set up

http://www.flickr.com/groups/artsmok...7594519396680/

How to :

http://www.flickr.com/groups/artsmoke/discuss/53695/

[wulf]

I did a set of incense smoke pictures back in January - click the example below to see more:



I had the incense stick on a table. The background was a dark velvet curtain and that was some distance away. The only illumination was a handheld LED flashlight, which enabled me to isolate the smoke from everything else.

I experimented with different shutter speeds and ISO settings. My favourite results generally combined a fairly fast shutter speed (to capture sharp forms rather than a blur) and as low an ISO as I could get away with (because I wanted to avoid graininess).

I also quickly discovered that autofocus was no help so set it to manual instead (if I repeat the experiment, I will probably set the focus before turning out the lights - as long as the smoke is ascending, the area that needs to be in sharp focus remains fairly shallow, so it can be set and left).

You can then, of course, invert the colours and rotate the shot, which I am guessing is what Kunal has done.

Wulf

[Nicole]

I finally managed to get this to work somewhat thanks to tips here and the links pointing me elsewhere...


Still working on it, but I was kinda happy with how this one turned out. Sorry about sidetracking your thread

[Saralonde]

I tried this last month.




Like Wulf I did it in front of black velvet with incense, which was about 2 feet away. I used gel transparencies of different colors tucked onto my speedlite. Used 100mm macro f2.8, ISO 200, 1/200 shutter priority and fired off shots in rapid succession. Like Wulf said, focusing was the biggest problem. I don't know where the breeze in my house was coming from, but it sure kept changing the flow of the smoke .
Definitely fun to try,particularly at this time of year. Sorry for the thread hijack.