Smoke Spill

[Ryewolf]

A little experiment with smoke photography I did this evening while food was cooking in the oven.

Smoke was from a really smokey incense cone - after 10 mins I had to open a window. (f8, 1/200th, iso100). The only light was from one of those DeWalt torches where the light part is on a bendy stalk. Image was rotated 90deg

The wine glass was long exposure on some glass and lit by the same torch (f13, 30secs, iso100) - in reality even though my camera said 30secs I'd actually covered the light after about 5-6 seconds.

The colour, in both, was a spiral gradiated fill on a separate layer. I used Photomatix Pro to tweak the smoke, then used PSP7 to put the two images together.

Smoke Spill

 

 

 

[ChrisLumix]

I like the smoke. I'm not so keen on the wine glass, or at least, its base. If you were to crop out the right hand side (white wine glass base, leaving the bowl) I think it would work tremendously well.

[JHFoto]

I like it..........

[Ryewolf]

Thanks Chris, JHF.. I'll look into a crop - though I'm worried that without seeing the base it like look a bit odd. I might also look at darkening the base so t's less pronunced like the rest of the glass. It's tricky stuff to light without getting to many reflections - particularly when you're improvising with a torch.

 

I was quite pleased with this, not bad for 45 mins effort while I was waiting

[ChrisLumix]

Thanks Chris, JHF.. I'll look into a crop - though I'm worried that without seeing the base it like look a bit odd. I might also look at darkening the base so t's less pronunced like the rest of the glass. It's tricky stuff to light without getting to many reflections - particularly when you're improvising with a torch.

 

I was quite pleased with this, not bad for 45 mins effort while I was waiting

 

I'm not so sure about that. The image is really an abstract, so with the dark red glow of the wine glass bowl, the viewer is going to just see a shape, not necessarily a familiar everyday object. Whereas with the distracting white reflections on the right, it does detract from the left hand side, which is glorious. Hope you don't mind, but I've done a crop to demonstrate what I mean... 

 

[Guest]

Great image but I have to agree with Chris much better without the wine glass bass.

[Ryewolf]

Thanks for all the comments everyone. No I don't mind you editing the images. Of the 2 crops, I think I prefer the wider one that Chris did, although Judy's one is growing on me.

 

I'll probably have another go at photographing smoke - this was only my 2nd attempt - the first ones I did, I had the camera a lot closer, so I was only catching part of the smoke. The trickiest part was actually positioning the light so it illuminated the smoke. The fun part was not knowing what the smoke was going to come out like....

[Phonantiphon]

I love the original - LOVE IT.

But, JMP's close crop is the shizzle, although I AM a fan of close crops anyway!!

[Ryewolf]

Thanks Phonantiphon, I did a different edit were I'd darkened the base and removed the reflection underneath.