There’s no end to the fun and creativity you can pour into a great light painting session. And the more techniques you have in your photographer’s utility belt the more interesting and professional your light painting can become.
Looking for a cheap fog machine or fog juice for your photography? Hurry out to your local pop-up Halloween store today: David Hobby of Strobist reminds us that these seasonal stores often offer deep-discounts of those things once All Hallows’ Eve has come and gone. Read more…
Massive wildfires in the Rockies have destroyed hundreds of homes and scorched tens of thousands of acres over the past week. To get an idea of how massive these fires are, check out this photograph captured by a NASA satellite.
The GOES-15 satellite keeps a stationary eye over the western U.S. and the smoke from the fires raging in many of the states have created a brownish-colored blanket over the region. The dawn’s early light revealed smoke and haze throughout the Midwest, arising from forest fires throughout the Rockies. While the most publicized fires occur along the populous eastern range in Colorado, the great smoke plumes in this image came from Wyoming.
Want to shoot photographs of rainbow-colored smoke? Just strap some color gels to your flash(es). Photographer Sean Wyatt used three snooted flashes with two colored gels on each flash to create a rainbow blend of color. He then used the setup to photograph smoke from burning incense sticks. Read more…
At first glance, some of Simon Davidson‘s photographs look like Harry Potter stills showing flying cars floating in the clouds. They’re actually a glimpse into the burnout subculture that’s growing in Australia. These are competitions in which drivers try to create as much smoke as they can by spinning their tires in place. Read more…
Here’s a fun idea for a weekend project: take pictures of smoke, think about what they look like, and then add color during post-processing to transform them. Photographer Geoff Jansen noticed that one of his smoke photos looked like a rose, so he added some red and green and ended up with the photo seen above. It’s the second creative rose shot we’ve featured today.
Photographer Grover Schrayer captured this amazing photograph of a rainbow in candle smoke.
I shot it with my Fuji Finepix S8100fd, with a Raynox M-250 macro lens attached. I shot at 1/1000th or higher, using the camera’s built-in flash. The built -in flash gave me head-on illumination of the smoke, and that head-on lighting allowed me to pick up the refraction through the droplets of wax. Any other angle of illumination would not produce the rainbow effect. The hardest part was getting the camera to focus on just the right part of the smoke. I focused on the wick, or the edge of the flame, had the shutter button half-pressed and ready, and blew out the candle and snapped very quickly. Most of the time the results were less than spectacular, but when the smoke and the timing cooperated, I got shots like this…
In his series “Elastic” photographer Edi Yang shows that you can fake smoke photography by shooting plastic bags a certain way. What you need is a strong backlight and some post-processing mojo. Read more…
