Smoke - trial run

oooooh really cool.. the colours and shapes in the 1st one really catch my eye

Love them all, great shots!

Nice shots! If you had shown #2 by itself & didn't say it was smoke, I might even think it's some gossamer material floating down.

Thanks for all the wonderful comments. I feel I should say that this is by no means a novel idea of mine. I've seen other people do it and wanted to give it a go. Quite some time ago Chris1le posted some really cool ones (which you can see HERE) and was kind enough to give me some pointers on how to set it up.

I varied the technique a bit, but basically my setup was a stick of lit incense on my dining room table for the smoke, a 3' softbox (you could use an off camera flash) on the left hand side, and a piece of black posterboard leaned against a chair across the table so my cream colored curtains wouldn't get to ruin the shots by reflecting any stray light back into the lens.

While I was composing the shots, I used the modeling lamp from my softbox ONLY - no other lights on in the room. The only part that's tricky is the focus, which I did manually, because the smoke is constantly in motion. To get a crisp shot, you need to hit it with enough light from your strobe/flash to freeze the motion. But you want to be sure that same light doesn't expose the surroundings to keep the background black.

That's pretty much it - after that, it's all a matter of photoshop.

thanks for passing along the pointers... a perfect example of a forum helping to advance the skils of the rest of the group. We'll all be smokin' beforethis is over.

Nice job. I really like #1.

I love all of them Athena. They'd look very nice as a series of 6x4's on a wall...

You're right Scott - this is a great forum.

Thanks Kathlin and Pete.
Ya know Pete - I rarely ever print any of my stuff for myself - just the kids pictures.