Smoke art photography tips You won’t go wrong if you…
1. Make sure the air is still: Although you’ll need to ventilate the room regularly, try to block any draughts. Still air will give you a focused smoke plume, but you can deliberately create eddies in the smoke by moving your hand towards and away from it, or by tapping on the base of the incense stick.
2. Experiment with the flash position: Take some time at the start of the session to find the optimum distance and angle to backlight the smoke. Begin with the flashgun position behind and to the side of the smoke, but also try lighting it from below and angled down, from a slightly higher position.
3. Start with the flash sync speed: You’ll find this in your camera manual; it’s typically 1/200 sec or thereabouts. By working in a darkened room, this reasonably fast shutter speed will prevent the ambient light from being recorded. Keep a torch with you, or use the light from your smartphone, so that you can check the smoke pattern or change batteries on your camera or flashgun.
4. Use a black background: Black velvet or similar material will make it much easier to retouch your images later. To avoid light hitting the backdrop, make a snoot for your flashgun. Check that the light from the flash is illuminating enough of the smoke when the snoot is in place.
5. Have fun with editing: A large part of the pleasure with this type of photography comes from cropping, rotating, mirroring, warping and adding colour (or removing it) later.