Snow fun

Just a short post to share an image I took last weekend.. As you can see, we've had some more snow...

- Bench in Snow -

Very Abstract Smoke Photography

As I didn't have much time to take new pictures, I'm still editing some of my smoke pictures and I can tell you, it is quite addictive.

Using the mirroring technique as mentioned in my previous post, I came up with this very abstract picture. It almost looks like a drawing or digital art I think, and most people will probably not think this is actually based on a photograph of smoke patterns (unless they have read my previous posts before).

What do you think, is this too abstract for photography? Or would you even think this is photography?

Just to give you an idea, I'm also posting the original shot, with no editing done at all.

More Smoke Photography

I’ve been playing with my smoke pictures again this weekend, and found some more interesting shapes and forms.
One of them just stood out to me and I’ll call it ‘the Sorcerer’. Don’t know if you see the same thing as I do… I had to do some cropping and cloning to remove smoke patterns that didn’t help the picture, to bring out the shape better.


I went through all the pictures again, rotated each picture just in case, and couldn’t find any other familiar shapes worth working on. So I decided to try another editing technique: mirroring.


At first, I tried some images by duplicating the image, flipping it, and moving it next to the original image (so in effect, the total picture size was doubled). In some cases I first cropped the image before duplicating, so the end result would be more appealing. Have a look at an example here.



Then I moved to a slightly different technique: duplicating the image, flipping it, and setting blending to ‘lighten’ and leave it on top of the original. This has the advantage of bringing everything that’s left of the center to the right and vice versa. Examples below.













I’m not done yet with playing with these pictures, I still have to try out blending in other images.. but this is it for now.

Smoke Experiments - how to photograph smoke

Two weeks ago I read a very interesting article/tutorial on photographing smoke on the photocritic.org blog with some excellent pictures by Graham Jefferey. Amazed by the smoke pictures. I decided to give it a try and test my new off-camera flash cord at the same time.



The setup:

A black sweater pulled over a chair served as my background, and the little box the flash cord came in served as my snoot, to avoid light spilling on my background and making it… not black.

When you set up, make sure you don’t have anything nearby that will reflect light from your flash on the background.

With the lights on, and the camera on the tripod, I focused on an object I held at the spot where I would be having the smoke, and then flipped my lens to manual focus. With a small aperture, this step may be a bit less important, but I just wanted to play safe. I tested with larger apertures as well.

I turned the main lights off to reduce the chance of light reflecting on my background (as this wasn’t a very professional set-up) and just had some small light source in the room so I wouldn’t bump into things.

The shooting:

A smoking incense stick in one hand, a flash and remote shutter release in the other, at about 90 degrees, the fun could start. I moved the incense stick in varying ways to get different smoke patterns. Now and then I checked the picture on my camera to make sure of what’s in the frame, so I wouldn’t have the stick in all my images, or miss out on the smoke. Try different exposure settings, different flash angles and keep shooting until you’re tired, your stick stops smoking, or your flash runs out of batteries.
And then you’ll have to clean up the ashes that fell on the floor in the process…

The editing:

Getting back at the computer I was amazed. Smoke patterns can be so beautiful and diverse! I had to throw some pictures out immediately because out of focus, totally black or not of interest. Remember at this point that you can crop, rotate and play with levels to increase the wow-factor of some images. On most images I just did that, for some others I cloned some of the excess smoke away. On one of the pictures, I saw what looked like a female figure, so I took away some excess smoke to bring it out better. A couple of days later I renewed the experience, and had another image with a more alien-like figure. What’s next?

As suggested in the photocritic.org article I changed the hue on some pictures as well, and inverted some others. I felt that for my pictures the black background works better so I didn’t invert many. I will surely repeat this experiment from time to time, and I suggest you give it a try as well. Or just enjoy the beautiful smoke images that are out there on the web.
Several people have suggested that I blend in other images with these smoke pictures, and that will definitely be a project to work on.

Thanks to Graham and photocritic.org for the article and information!

Welcome to the Lumendipity Photography Blog

Here I'll post some new images, some of them with comments on where, how or why they were made. In addition to that, I may post some general photography comments, links to interesting articles and the likes.

Make sure you also check the main website http://www.lumendipity.com/. Though at the moment the homepage still says 'coming soon', just click on the image to access a photo gallery. More should be... coming soon.