Step 1: While my parents were staying at my place I decided to do some tests with smoke photography.
For a little bit more than half-an-hour I’m convinced they thought I was going crazy, since I came from work with a giant black matte cardboard piece and started burning a lot of incense and taking non-stop pictures of the smoke column. One incense stick, two at the same time, several at the same time, quiet and straight smoke column, disturbing the column with my breath or blowing at it and all the weird things to have a lot of distinct shots. I tried to explain my parents that it should look interesting in the end but they didn’t seem very convinced.

Step 2 was to get rid of the bad pictures (not interesting, out of focus, bad framing), and they were a lot. From around 250, I ended up with 15 to continue. Not surprising since I was not really sure if it would work and the digital camera was just an average 5 megapixel one.

Step 3 was the most interesting one. And it is quite simple. Basically the only thing you need to do is to crop and rotate until you get the perfect framing and after that change the grey tones to any color tone (Photoshop: image > adjustments > hue/saturation and play with the sliders). You might need to fix the levels a little bit before colouring the smoke, if the background is not pure black (Photoshop: image > adjustments > autolevels should be enough). You can also invert (Photoshop: image > adjustments > invert) to end up with a white background smoke picture.

And that’s it. There are some results below. Click the thumbnails to open a bigger version. This was just my first test and I will play with the technique a little bit more when I have some time. I want to try also with video to see if it works or ends up as something interesting at least.

Yes, that’s what I used for the blog header image.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 16:53 and is filed under Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.