Smoke Photography: Alternative to using external flash

Smoke photography always fascinated me. It creates such surreal abstract patterns that you can't take your eyes off the final creation!

I read the technique of how this is done and found some very good tutorials on this subject here and here. I also found a Flickr group which has many images and good discussions around this art form.

In summary, there are three basic requirements that your setup need to meet:

the first requirement is to have a dark background,

the second is to fire the flash at an angle such that it illuminates the smoke but does not light the background. Typically, keep the flash at 10 o'clock position from where you stand, a little below to incense, and fire it towards the smoke,

and the third requirement is to use a fast shutter speed. Smoke by its nature will lose it's form very quickly. So a shutter speed of at least 1/200s will allow you to freeze the smoke and give you crisp patterns.

Now the best way to meet these requirements is to use a external flashgun which you can sync with your camera at say 1/200s. That way, when you fire the shutter, external flash goes off at the same time (almost). I have heard that people use flash triggers to fire the external flash.

Once you capture the smoke then it is all post processing that gives you the final result.

In this post, I will only talk about what limitations I faced which prevented me from using the above mentioned technique for capturing smoke.

The main problem – you can call it the show stopper, was that I do not own a external flash or a direct focus light!!! So there is no way I can get the light at an angle. So I thought that story ends here unless I can think of some way to fire flash or a light burst from an angle.

After lot’s of trial and error (….and a pair of watery burning eyes), I came up with this idea…….

I decided to use two cameras - my DSLR mounted on tripod as the main camera and got my old point and shoot camera and tried to use it as flash instead of an external flash.

The issue here was that I found it nearly impossible to time the flash from point and shoot to sync with shutter speed of 1/200s. Result was a lot of (mostly) black frames with no smoke captured!! So using a fast shutter speed was not an option available to me.

Then I thought that it is a dark room with hardly any light, and small aperture (f/11 – f14) even with long exposure time of 3-4 seconds, without flash, did not give me any chance of getting any thing exposed. But in the same dark room, if I fire the flash even once, in between these 3-4 seconds when the camera shutter is open, I will be able to capture some thing.

So I did the setup – used a black card paper as background, lit up an incense (agarbatti or dhoop sticks available in market) and instead of external flash, I placed my point and shoot camera and fired the flash (just took a picture with flash forced) while the main camera shutter was open for 4 seconds.

I used self timer to release the main camera shutter – so that gave me 10 seconds to adjust the point and shoot flash angle and create nice smoke patterns (I very lightly blew some air on the incense).

I was getting the smoke captured, but the flash from point and shoot was lighting up the whole area including the black background and I was loosing contrast.

I needed to focus the flash output to a narrow area around the smoke – what I needed was a ‘snoot’ – an object you fit on top of your flash to narrow the beam if you will. I do not have a snoot either (remember, I don’t have a external flash….so having a snoot was a no brainer!!)

Another cheap trick - I picked up a old newspaper, rolled it and made a cone out of it and used it as a snoot in front of the point and shoot camera. Call it crude, but it worked!!

That’s it – the steps after the smoke is captured remain same as documented by others. Increase contrast, use levels, increase sharpness a bit, invert and then use color tools - Hue/Saturation to color the smoke.

I used GIMP on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 for the post processing. Some pro’s and con’s I observed:

Pro’s:

You now have a workaround if you do not own a external flash!! No need to feel jealous looking at all amazing pictures others clicked just because you do not have external flash!!

Con’s:

Due to long exposure, and suspended smoke particles in air, your pictures tend to get noisy and may not be good in contrast / sharpness as they would with a fast shutter speed synced with a external flash.

It is luck dependent as you cannot shoot as soon as you see an interesting pattern forming. You hope that within the 3-4 seconds you kept your shutter open, some good patterns do come up.

But what the heck, think of it this way - now you can at least do some trial without spending additional money on external flash.

If you don’t have additional camera, then just borrow your friends camera and use it as flash!! Don’t forget to gift him a mounted print so that keeps him happy!!!

While closing I get one more thought – can I use my mobile phone camera as a flash?

If you try out this techniques, do share your pictures!