Smoke photography

I've seen a lot of examples of smoke photography lately, and wanted to give it a try myself. A pretty good amount turned out well, and I'm going to do some photoshop experimenting with the color on a few, but here's the first of the set. This one only has minor edits done in Lightroom.



Here's a diagram of the setup I used to get the shot:


The setup was pretty basic. I had my camera level with the smoke against a black background. I used a Canon Speedlite with a snoot to light the smoke, at a 90 degree angle to the camera and at the same height. The important thing is to light only the smoke, and to not let any light spill onto the backdrop. I shot with a wide angle lens and cropped the images in Lightroom (shot at ISO 100 so that the extreme crops still look good)

After my Photo a Day/365 project ends on December 31st, I'll have more time to update this blog, which will include the rest of the smoke shots!