Some miscellaneous shots from last couple weeks weather has been awful so shooting inside. Trying out a couple of ideas from some photo mags (smoke and water drops) and giving me a chance to use off camera flash and close up filters I acquired. Click the pics for bigger at Flikr. Double spiral Smoke Water drops Shots B&W Shots coloured C&C welcomed.
#1 would look great in a vertical orientation--point down (think: jellyfish), and perhaps with a different color tone...pink doesn't do it for me. I like the shot glass shots as well...good stuff
Very nice, I especially like the black and white shots picture. As an art teacher I think it'd be cool to do a class on smoke art, since that's really popular right now. How did you learn to do it? ps. I say go for the jellyfish rather than the tree
I followed a tutorial from October 2008 practical photography, but its quite simple. Use a piece of black card as a back drop, incense stick about 30cm in front. flashgun with a remote cord to camera positioned behind incense to backlight it. use a second piece of card on the flash as a barn door to stop light from the flash hitting the background. with camera in manual set aperture to f/8 and set shutter speed to sync with flash. position camera above the incense stick and to focus tilt down and focus on the tip, then tilt back to level. Dial down the power on the flash to its lowest setting and then start playing. move flash away from smoke if its too bright, or closer if its too dim. then its a case of taking lots and lots of shots till you get some shapes you like, think I took about 140 shots and liked about 10 of them
mind explaining how you got the lighting on the shot glasses? i'm really, really liking the BnW shot. well done!
Quick pic courtesy of Word, (I’m at work its all I’ve got.) flash 1 is on a micro stand under the table and about 1.5 meters from the white reflector I used as a background. Flash 2 was handheld on a velborn umbrella clamp (didn’t have second stand then), up, left and behind the camera. Then I played with gels and settings on the flashes, I believe flash 1 is on 1/16 power with an CTO gel, and flash 2 which doesn’t have manual settings is gel’d with a CTO +0.6 ND gel. And then hand held to a distance I liked. All flashes fired using ebay radio triggers. Camera was fired using remote and 2 sec delay, giving me enough time to drop remote pick up bottle and pour. (I need an assistant ) End result was very nearly black and white ( had a small brown reflection on one edge of the glasses, can be seen here), all colours where added in elements using a gradient layer set to soft light. I did try using some colour gels but the lack of manual settings on the second flash made it too hard to get the effect I wanted
