Smokeshadows

Hello all! Been a while since my last post so time to catch up a little. I have been experimentint with photographing smoke from incense and manipulating the images in Photoshop. Here are a few examples.

You can view the rest of the gallery on my website.

These were created using 4,800 watt seconds of power (Speedotron pack and two heads) to allow me to stop the lens down to f/32 to get enough depth of field to keep the image sharp. Controlling spill is nearly impossible at this power level in a small enclosed space, so I was flagging light all over the place. I ended up making a 12" diameter snoot around one reflector and using a grid on the other one and facing them directly at each other with the smoke rising between the two. You should hear the "pop" when strobes are triggered at this power level. It almost sounds like a gun going off!

The images were then opened in photoshop's raw converter and optimized for saturation, brightness and contrast before converting to jpeg and moving on to photoshop where they were inverted and cropped. Quite a laborious process but I like the results.