After looking at some pretty cool smoke art in the Flickr group called Smoke Art and here at the Sensitve Light website, I wanted to give it a try. There is a pretty useful tutorial on how to create your own smoke art here at Graham Jeffery’s weblog.
This was my first attempt at creating smoke art. I used my 5×7 collapsible black backdrop. I put an incense on a stool about 2-3 feet away from the backdrop. My Speedlite 430ex was then setup on a light stand about 1-2 ft away from the stool on the left side. My camera was on a tripod in the front ranging from about 1-3 ft away. I used my prime 50mm f1.8 lens. My camera settings were at ISO 200, f14, and at 1/200. It was done in my room with the lights completely turned off so that it would be completely dark. Of course this also meant I could not see anything so I just kept firing away hoping for some good shots. Afterwards, the room was really smokey and smelly. The flash was set to full power since you are suppose to have as much as light as possible to capture the smoke. I used the Cactus V2 to trigger the flash. I also snapped away so much, I overheated my Speedlite 430ex! I highly recommend listening to the recommendation of letting the flash rest for 10 minutes after continuously shooting 20 shots. That sort of sucks because I now have to send it back to Canon for repair and will be without my flash for a couple weeks. I definitely learned a lot from setting up this shoot and there are several things I will try to change next time to get a better shot. Some things would be to try to move the background back a little more or to add a snoot to the flash so that there is less stray light. Next time, I will probably try to use continuous lighting so that I can actually see the smoke and shoot at a higher shutter speed.
