Smoke #3

Peter Mannfolk from Landskrona, Sweden

Hi Betsy, glad you liked it! I used a candle light and then held a socket wrench (I think that´s the name...) over it, nearly putting the light out. That created a thick enough smoke which was captured using the flash setup decribed above. Previously, I have tried using the built-in flash straight on and that gave reasonable results as well. In this case I used my 50 mm lens from a distance of 50 cm or so and the background was my black jacket placed another 50 cm behind the light. I tried a rather small aperture in order to get a decent depth of field, but getting a really sharp image is still very hard and in this case it is a bit fuzzy. I started of inverting the image in Photoshop and then just fiddled around with a curve layer to get an appearance I liked (don´t hesitate to use very unorthodox curves here, anything goes...). I also converted the image into black and white and toned it using a Hue/Saturation layer. Of course, not everything in the original capture is good so look for a crop that looks nice and has sharp edges. That´s pretty much it and as you can see from my description it´s not a very fancy setup but still I think that maybe 10 out of a total of 40 images or so was useful although I´ve seen examples on the net that are much sharper. Good luck and thanks for your comments! /Peter

2 Mar 2009 1:37pm