Smoke trails - first attempt

[Cyberman]

This week at camera club we did a practical session on capturing smoke trails.
It was great fun and gave me chance to try out my 5DmIII along with my new 600EX-RT and wireless trigger.

Here are the results I've edited so far...

Smoke_Trails_01 by cyberdavis, on Flickr

Smoke_Trails_02 by cyberdavis, on Flickr

Smoke_Trails_03 by cyberdavis, on Flickr

Smoke_Trails_04 by cyberdavis, on Flickr

As always comments are welcomed.

[tesarver]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

Beautiful set Andy

Tom

[Stan]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

Something i like to do in the winter months - you never quite know what you are going to get

Stan

[Dave s]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

Cool set mate really like that first one.would it be possible to explain the setup ?

[Cyberman]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

would it be possible to explain the setup ?

Of course no problem at all, here goes...

An incense stick (non-scented ones) was mounted in front of some black card, about 50cm (maybe more) away. Black velvet or similar would be easier as you'd have to worry less about light hitting it I suspect.
My camera was on a tripod facing the incense stick, I used my 100mm macro lens.
My flash was on a stand to one one side and was being triggered wirelessly.
I'd angled the flash and set it to its maximum zoom to try and prevent too much light hitting the background. Also took care to try and avoid light going straight into lens.
I used manual mode and 1/200 at f11 as the settings, and triggered via remote to prevent any shake etc.
Then it was a case of trying to see when the smoke had a decent pattern and going for it.
I tried to influence the smoke direction by gently using my hand to cause air movements, sometimes with better success than others!

It was not too hard to setup, the key was having the flash to one side and controlling the light to prevent unwanted glare or reflections.
Tried two flashes, one on either side, but did not like the results. Probably needed to play around with their power more, but ran out of time.

Afterwards in processing I used the various settings (exposure, contrast, white, black etc) to increase the detail of the smoke, and on some inverted the image to get the white background and then converted to black and white.

Hope that summary helps, if you want more detail of anything just ask, happy to share info.

[Dave s]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

thanks mate for the info will have to give this a try.

[Cyberman]

Re: Smoke trails - first attempt

Thanks for looking and for all the kind comments.