How to Photograph Smoke

Ever since I published my smoke art on the blog, I have had a number of people asking me to go into further details on how to achieve what I did and how to photograph smoke properly.

The smoke

What to use to generate enough smoke, I went out and purchased a load of incense sticks and a holder, as they put out a decent amount of smoke, and they smell better than cigarettes.  I found that the best results were achieved in a darkened room, I drew my blind and hung a piece of black cloth over it, and the top of my desk. To be safe I also used a glass chopping board underneath the incense stick holder, to ensure no embers fell onto the cloth and started a fire.

You will need to ensure that the room is not too drafty or indeed sealed, as the smoke rises it makes some nice patterns but after a certain height it begins to break up into more of a mist, and make it difficult to photograph smoke.  The camera was mounted on a tripod, with a 28-70 f/2.8 Sigma lens (a large aperture helps to blur the background), with a remote release.  Remember to switch the lens to manual once you have achieved focus on where the smoke will be, in decent light.  Alternatively you can do as I did below ;o)

How to light the smoke

How to light the smoke, I used a single Canon 580EX flash with an improvised spill kill attached (a piece of black card taped to one side to stop unwanted light entering the camera), this was connected via an off shoe cord, mounted on a mini tripod to the left of the setup.  Using a flash helps you to photograph smoke as it freezes the movement.

Focus is achieved by placing something on the same plane as the the smoke, I used my hand and used the focus assist on the 580EX to obtain focus, then switched form AF to MF as the camera or the incense stick were not going to be moved, so there was no need to use AF from that point on.

Be prepared to take a large number of images, a slight draft will help to create variations in the flow of the smoke, I used a small notebook to create a slight draft when needed.

Post Processing

The post processing of smoke images can be as easy or as complicated as you wish, the easy way is by adjusting the levels first, so you get a nice clean white for the smoke and a nice clean black for the background.  This is followed by burning in of stray wisps of smoke. You can stop there if you wish but if you want to colour the images or have a white background, these are also simple to achieve.

I have found that if you want to colour a smoke image it is better when you have a white background, now how do we achieve this, firstly you will need to desaturate the image, and then invert the image so white is black and black is white.  You may want to stop there, but if you do want to colour the smoke you will need to use adjustment layers.

To make the smoke one colour all you have to do is add a hue/saturatrion adjustment layer, in the settings dialogue, tick the colorize check box, slide the hue slider to a colour which appeals, and adjust the saturation slider to suit. If you would like more than one colour then just add a different hue/saturation adjustment layer for each colour and modify the mask for each colour you use.

Have fun, go Photograph Smoke, be safe and don’t forget to ventilate the room every now and then, and experiment with different ways of colouring your smoke images.

Gareth Williams LSWPP – Portrait Photography Dundee