Last night I decided to try smoke photography for the first time, I have always liked the simplicity and how unique smoke looks. I was quite surprised at how simple it was to take the pictures. The most difficult step was the setup of the shot and after that it was just a matter of waiting for a cool smoke pattern. Things you will need:

• Incense, I got mine at a dollar store for very cheap
• Something to hold the incense, I used a incense holder but you could use modeling clay or something like that
• A dark background, I used a black mat board
• A reflector, I used a white mat board
• A strobe or flash, I used a Nikon SB600
• A snoot or cardboard to make one for your flash
• Somehow to trigger the flash or strobe remotely (wireless receiver or sync cables)
• A camera that can trigger the flash
• A tripod is very helpful but you could probably get away without one
• A remote shutter release would be really handy, I didn’t have one
• Pink Floyd (optional)

Now for the hard part the setup, the following diagram is a basic idea of what you want, and it looks way fancier than my actual setup. The most important thing is you want to make sure your flash or strobe is not hitting your background as you want it solid black.

Here is my actual setup, notice the cardboard snoot, mat background and reflector.

My camera setting for the most part where the following:

• 60mm Nikkor micro lens
• ISO 200
• 1/200 sec
• f/7.1
• Flash was zoomed to 85mm and set to 1/2 power

The hard part is getting the focus bang on as its dark and the smoke is always moving. What I found worked best was focus on the tip of the incense and the move your camera up slightly. It seems that even with this the best way to get good pictures is to take a lot. Once you are setup noting changes and you just keep taking pictures and hope that they work out well. Once you have taken some pictures its time to play with them in Photoshop or your image editing software, I will be using Photoshop CS3. Off your camera you pictures will have a black background and white smoke. This looks nice but so do pretty colours!

There are a few things you can do to alter the image, you can invert it to get the white background and add colour, leave the background black and add colour thats all up to you. To have coloured smoke on black background in Photoshop simply goto the image menu and the adjustments and the click invert (or use crtl+ i). Next we will add the colour, goto the layer menu and add a new adjustment layer you will want to select the Hue/Saturation item. Once that control is up click the colourize box and start moving the hue slider to change the colour and you can play with the Saturation slider to make the colours more or less vibrant.

To have coloured smoke on a black background simply skip the invert step. Now you should have something you can show off, take a look at some of the pictures I was able to capture.

Take a look at all the images in my gallery or the set on Flickr.