Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Smokin'

Smokin'

I've seen these kind of shots done before and wanted to try them out, but didn't have the equipment or the knowledge of how to do it. Thanks to the interwebs, I picked up the knowledge part. Thanks to seriously getting into portrait and wedding photography, I picked up the equipment part.

There's quite an involved process in getting smoke shots, from lighting (two strobes firing simultaneously from left and right against a black background) to playing with background colors in Photoshop (invert smoke image, choose a background color, invert it, layer inverted smoke image over it, multiply, flatten and invert). But the result is kinda cool.

Now to play around with colored gels on the flashes, inserting objects into the smoke trails and yada yada yada without burning the house down.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

2 comments:

Dawning Inspiration said...

Pretty cool. I tried to do something similar the other day but don't have all the necessary tools - yet!

PJ said...

I can smell the smoke from here. It's pretty fabulous in blue, I would never have thought of that for a color.