A puff in time

[abarickman]

I posted this one in "share your shots" but afterward I thought it would be interesting to post here how I got this shot and what I learned in getting it.

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My cousin and I started out at twilight and my idea was to just get a cool rim lit shot of him ,or I, standing looking at the lake with some color in the sky. I started by trying my flash laying on the ground pointed up but had problems with my wireless triggers since they were being blocked by the body of the flash. I took out a stand and mounted the flash on it and the triggers started functioning properly again. I set the height of the stand at about chest level. I tried bare bulb with my flash zoomed in to 105mm but I just could not get a nice rim light, it was too weak in comparison to the ambient light. I put my grid spot on the flash, turned it to full power, and aimed at his head while he stood in place. Better but not there. I then bumped my ISO up to 400, lowered my F stop to 4.5 and started to get a pretty nice rim light.



I had some cigars which we were going to enjoy later and my cousin had the great idea to incorporate them in the shots. By this time ambient light was fading so I bumped the shutter speed to somewhere around 6-8 seconds to still get some color in the sky. One of us would stand in place, the other person would shoot the test fire button on the flash to determine if the rim light was properly placed. We used the 2 second count down timer and counted aloud so that we could blow the smoke at just the right moment. We then froze in place until the shutter closed.

The pics were looking great and so we started playing with adding additional affects using our iPhones screens as a fill light. We would count down, puff, flash and then put our iPhones in place to cast light where we wanted a little fill. In this shot I used the flashlight app for iPhone with it casting red light. I think it was only in place for about 2 seconds of the 8 second exposure.



The top shot is using the home screen for fill on my face and probably for less than a second. Since the flash had frozen the moment in time you don't see our arms move into place and back to our side.

In this shot I held the cigar in front of each of my eyes for about 2 seconds during the exposure. I had to clean up the light in between the eyes in Photoshop because in moving it I got a streak between the two locations.



What I learned and will change next time:
1) Bring a flashlight and set focus on each shot. If you don't shine your flashlight on the subject to focus its tough to get it right. If you look at the photos up close they are slightly out of focus.
2) Once it got darker I should have lowered the ISO back down. an 8 second exposure at ISO 400 had more noise than I would have liked.
3) Shoot at a greater depth of field to allow more latitude in focusing. I was using F4.5 but could have just extended the shutter time instead.
4) Get a remote shutter release to get the timing of the smoke release just right. I would just hold it against my leg with one hand and fire when I started to exhale.

It was a lot of fun and I am very happy with the shots. Next time they will be sharper based on what I learned.

[FocalFrenzy]

Nice How-To. Very creative and something I'm going to have to try.

[sgeary]

rather creative!

[Elite Shutterbug]

WOW! i love it i have tried some smoke stuff in the past but never thought to do anything quite like that. im gonna have to try that...So cool

great work btw, i love it

[abarickman]

Thanks everyone for the comments. Only warning I have is that you have quite a buzz when done from quickly puffing on the cigar to make the smoke clouds.