Photographing Smoke

A lock-down project

I didn't need to travel too far for this on-location entry, just out to the garage. This particular project was one of a few that I tried during the Great Victorian Lock-Down of 2020 to keep myself busy.

The set up was quite simple: I used a strobe with a barn door, honeycomb grid, and coloured gel on one side and a softbox on the opposite side at very low power. The smoke came from a single incense stick held upright with a clamp, clamping the incense on an angle worked better than straight up. You could try bundling more incense sticks together for thicker smoke but I thought that one was adequate. I found that lighting the smoke from the side and slightly behind gave the best results. The heavy black background worked well but I didn't try any other backdrops to compare. I did try quite a few lighting configurations with a digital camera to get the staging right before opening a pack of film.

I used the Mamiya RZ67 ProII with the 180mm f/4.5 lens and #2 extension tube. The film stock was Portra 160. That set up did give me a few problems with DoF. When I developed the film I discovered that several frames were out of focus. This was mainly caused when the smoke wafted towards the camera and out of the zone of focus. It doesn't take much air movement to affect the smoke. I found that a very subtle wave with a sheet of paper from behind the camera provided plenty of movement.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. It was a fun project and helped kill a few hours of lock-down boredom.