Smoke Art

Shooting smoke in an artistic form is a fun and deservedly popular photographic technique. It’s pretty easy to do just about anywhere and you don’t need a whole lot of space or any special equipment to do it.

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What You Need

Tripod-mounted camera.
Off-camera lighting.
Dark background – cardboard or a bedsheet works well.
Incense.

Set Up

Hang or otherwise attach your dark background behind the incense. Directly in front of the incense, set up your camera on it’s tripod. Lens choice is up to you – for the shot here I used a 50mm lens set at f8 and 1/250 sec. To the side, you need to set up your lighting. Something as simple as a remote flash triggered wirelessly or with an off-camera shoe cord works well. You will need to somehow prevent the light from the flash hitting the background and the lens – you just want it to land on the incense smoke. Using a snoot, some kind of flagging device or even a couple of strips of gaffer’s tape on the flash should do the trick.

Shooting

With the room lights on, focus on the tip of the incense stick. Now switch the lens to manual focus, and reposition the camera so that the incense is just out of frame. You may need to finetune the focus a bit, but you should be pretty close. Once you’re happy, light the incense, switch off the room lights and start taking photos, preferably using a remote shutter release. You could hold a spoon or cup over the smoke to let a lot build up, then remove it to give you a better chance of getting some good smoke amounts.

Processing

For the photo above, processing was very simple. I imported it into Lightroom, increased the contrast, clarity and vibrance and pushed the blacks up a bit. The spot removal tool took care of minor dust spots. The total processing time was about 1-2 minutes once I’d selected the image. You can create variations as well. The following image is exactly the same yet with a different white balance setting.

Smoke Art variation

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