Smoking in the boys room...

The temperature reached 38C on Friday. And was I doing something sensible? No Along with a photographer friend (from here on referred to as TP, you know who you are), I was shut in a studio/shed, trying to photograph smoke.

It was damn hot in there, and smokey. We were trying to establish the technique for lighting and photographing the smoke from an incense stick after being inspired by the photography of Graham Jeffrey over at Sensitive Light.

We managed some interesting results, but didn’t get the quality we were after. To get better results on the next try, we will move the backdrop further away so no light at all gets on it (if the back ground isn’t totally black, it is hard to get all the detail in the smoke, you loose some when you manipulate the background to black).

We also need more light on/in the smoke. Unlike other sorts of photography using flash, you can’t really reflect the light off the smoke it just goes through. So you need sufficient light at the right angle to get the detail. Also, I need to zoom in more; I had to do way too much cropping.

At least I came home smelling of sandalwood.