Through My Eyes!

By kevreid

Smoking!

Today i was staying with the fire theme, but this time photographing smoke.
I lit an incense stick (vanilla) and positioned it about 2 feet in front of a plain black packground.
Using a small table lamp on the left I pointed it to the smoke allowing me to focus with the autofocus on the camera. I then used a radio trigger to fire a full power flash positioned to the right of the incense stick, this would over power the table lamp and with the camera at 1/250 of a second , it illuminates the smoke.
to ensure the background stayed black I used a snoot on the flash , this gave a beam of light that did not go on the background.(without the snoot , some flash would have sprayed onto the black background)
So into photoshop, the smoke comes up white, the background was already black, so i added an adjustment layer which let me change the hue of the smoke, in this case to green although other colours look just as good!
Now inverting the image gives the white background and greens change to purple.
I couldn't decide which version i like best , so i flipped the purple horizontally and added it into the black one to compare the two,
Which version do you prefer?
Mrs R likes the white background.
I'll repeat this tomorrow and add the tutorial to my website.

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