Getting Started with Smoke Photography
(Guest Post by Nuno Correia)

Note from Dan: I’ve always been impressed with Nuno Correia’s smoke photography over at Photoassignment.net, many examples of which he’s shared with Cheapshooter readers. I asked him to write a tutorial on how he approaches smoke photography, and he gladly obliged. Thanks to Nuno for this great post - I’m excited to try his methods out for myself.

Smoke photography can free your imagination: its like looking for familiar figures in the clouds. The minimalism found in a thin line of smoke and the complexity of its little swirls is fascinating.

You don’t need top notch hardware to capture smoke photos; a point-and-shoot digital camera works just fine. See how after the jump.

The Smoke

To get smoke, we need to make it. Don’t be an arsonist; big flames won’t cut it for this kind of photography. The cheapest way to get the “right” kind of smoke is using incense sticks.

You should pick a well ventilated place to take the photos, because the smoke will fill up the room, ruining the quality of your work. Smoke is sensitive to even the tiniest of disturbances; use this to your advantage to sculpt your photo. Use spoons and even sound to manipulate the shape the smoke creates. Get creative.

How To Shoot It

Background
Once you are happy with the shape of your smoke, it’s time to take the photograph.

The smoke produced by incense sticks or cigarettes is a light white color, so use a darker background. In this way you’ll have great contrast between the foreground and the background to better capture the nuances in the smoke.

It’s common to see white smoke on a black background, and it’s easier to take the photo that way. But what about all those images with darker smoke? Oftentimes those are false negatives, created in post-processing.

Lighting
You need a good depth of field (DOF) to capture all the details of a smoke columns, which leads you to use a higher f-stop (a bigger number). This requires more light to shoot, meaning the shutter speed generally should be longer as well. This isn’t desirable; you want to freeze the smoke so you need higher speeds. To accomplish that you’ll need a well lit smoke with the most powerful source of light you can find. Don’t spend too much - you can use an external flash, the built-in flash of your camera or any kind of bright lamp.

This is where the point-and-shooters may find themselves in trouble. Most point-and-shoot cameras can’t use an external flash, and if you’re using the built-in flash, you’ve to get your background as far way as you can, since any light leakage from the flash will destroy the contrast you are trying to create. A good alternative is to use the night sky as background.

Focusing

To get the smoke focused can be difficult; after all, you’re shooting in the dark, making auto-focus unreliable at best. The trick for a good focus is to turn the lights back on. Use any object or your own hand and place it the same distance as the smoke; the camera will appreciate the help. After the auto-focus is done with its job, it’s time to turn manual focus on. From this moment on you can’t move the camera - you jeopardizing the focus if you do.

Exposure
As you saw earlier, you’ll need a higher f-stop (smaller aperture) and high speed. On top of that you’ll need a lower ISO setting, to avoid noise on the final result. On point-and-shoot you should use the manual setting, but not all the point-and-shoots have this capability.. A workaround to this is using the landscape program (untested by me) where the camera chooses a smaller aperture to create a depth-of-field. If you’re all set … start shooting!

Post-Processing
If you followed all the previous steps, you’ve got some nice photos for processing with Adobe Photoshop, Gimp or another image processing software.
Your goal in the post-processing is cleaning up small (or big) imperfections on the background, adjust contrast, sharpening, inverting, coloring, cropping, bringing that “bling” factor to it.

Happy shooting!

Nuno Correia
http://photoassignment.net.

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Related links:
Smoke: By Myla Kent
ArtSmoke: Group on Flickr
Photocritic.org: Abstract smoke photography how-to
Turbulence: A Sensitive Light blog entry, June 2005
Just boasting: A Sensitive Light blog entry, November 2004