Sunday, December 29, 2024
Here we are at the very end of 2024. It seems like just yesterday we were welcoming in the new year and then all of a sudden it was Thanksgiving. The year really has gone up in smoke in a very quick fashion. This may very well be my last regular blog entry of the year, though we still have my top 12 significant images coming up vey soon. Keep your eyes out for that one. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a little studio shoot that I did this morning. I tried a few different things with the smoke photography that I do from time to time. It is something that I can do when the weather isn’t good to get outside, or I just want to try something a little different.
This morning, I really wanted to get out and do some photography with the clouds. The only problem was those clouds brought a lot of rain. We were actually under a severe thunderstorm warning for most of the day. It never got that bad, but it was wet enough to keep me inside. I still wanted to do a little shooting, so I decided that it was time to get the studio up and running. I had been toying with the idea of doing some more smoke photography over the last few weeks and I figured that now was as good a time as any. It really didn’t take that long to get things set up because there was only a black backdrop, a table, a single light stand with a speedlite and my camera on a tripod. Of course, for this type of photography, I have found that using a macro lens makes life a lot easier on me in many respects. The only one that I have is for the RF mount R5 which is my preferred studio rig anyway.
It took about 20 minutes to get it all pulled out and set up which wasn’t too bad. There was another ten minutes or so getting the light dialed in and the focus set. For this, there is no auto focus that will accurately work, so I preset the focus point and lock it in by using a piece of paper with some writing on it. Once I got things set up, I brought out the incense cone and lit it. Right after I blew out the candle, the first problem popped up.
I hadn’t even turned my attention to the camera yet and the power went off. Now, I just had a desk lamp and a floor lamp lighting up the studio, so there wasn’t much light anyway. When the power went off, I was reminded just how dark this studio could be with no windows or ambient light. Fortunately, the lights came back on, but then turned off again. This was repeated two more times before I could get the computer unplugged in the dark. When I finally got it unhooked, I used a flashlight to give me a little light on the smoke so I could see what I was working with. The light was faint enough that it wasn’t going to interfere with the exposure at all, so I wasn’t too worried.
I began making exposures and after the third or fourth frame, the lights came back on and decided to stay. I thought I was going to be in the clear at this point, but there was another problem that popped up. I had forgotten to kill the heat pump before getting started and that kicked on. I was using a different part of the studio than I normally work in and the draft wasn’t as bad with the heat, but it still affected where the smoke was appearing in the frame. I pushed the incense over slightly to counter the drift and that seemed to work. However, now the focus was off.
I grabbed my sheet of paper and got the focus reset again while trying not to burn the house down. Once that was done, I went back to the camera and started to press the button some more as I used that sheet of paper to disrupt the smoke stream to give it a little interest. This was working well, but for some reason the side that I was fanning was the side that the smoke was coming to. This was odd because I was used to the fanning actually pushing the smoke away. I countered that problem by shifting sides with the paper. I would even fan it from the top for some variety.
There was really no time to watch the image review as I was really concentrating on getting the right patterns in the frame. This was the start of my next problem. I had wondered how the batteries were doing in the flash since it had been used for a couple of shoots now. It seemed to charge up at a normal pace, but now that I was firing it at 1/2 power, it was taking progressively longer to recharge. Instead of firing off a shot every few seconds, I was having to wait about ten seconds between exposures. I knew that the incense would give me about 20 good minutes of smoke before it faded out and the room filled with smoke. I didn’t have time to dig out batteries, so I just slowed my process down. Of course, this resulted in having only a fraction of photographs to choose from in the editing phase compared to what I was typically used to. By the end, I had shot 67 frames when I am normally in the 200 realm.
Now, I could have prevented all of this by using one of my studio strobes. The batteries last forever in those, and I would only have to work them at something like 1/64 power which would decrease the recycle time to an insignificant amount. The problem that I run into with that setup is the fan in the strobes which, of course, affects the smoke stream. I tried it once, and it was a maddening exercise and I vowed to just use the speedlites from then on. They aren’t as efficient or as powerful, but they don’t have fans to deal with.
The slower rate of making images was making it really difficult to nail the right moment, and I was seeing most of the really good patterns pass by when the flash was recharging. Occasionally, I would see a great one developing and would fire hoping that the flash was ready. I would be rewarded with a black frame on review indicating that the flash didn’t fire. Yeah, the battery issue was totally my fault as I should have just put fresh ones in to get started with. At least it wasn’t a client shoot, and I didn’t have to produce anything at all from the session.
In addition to the slower pace, I was also having to adjust the position of the incense from time to time to take into account the different breezes in the studio. After the third time I took the long recycle time to check my focus. It was looking a little soft, so I tried to dial it back in using the focus peaking which I thought worked well here. It didn’t. The next frame that I shot, I checked for the focus and found it softer than the previous. It was time to get my piece of paper back out and lock in the focus again.
After that standard 20 minutes passed, the smoke was getting very faint and the room was filling with it which was starting to affect the contrast. It was time to call it a day. With all the issues, I was really thinking that I was going to be trashing all of the photographs. I was fine with that, because I had tried my experiment and it wasn’t working quite as good as I had hoped. That brought us to the final problem. This was one that I hadn’t been aware of while shooting which was a real shame because it would have influenced the outcome of my experiment.
I really wanted to get the smoke to expose brighter than it had been in the photos, so I decided that instead of setting the exposure at the shooting aperture, I would overexpose the lights by a full stop to start with. In this situation, I was wanting to shoot at f/11 for maximum depth of field while the lights were set at f/16. I had dialed all this in on the light meter at ISO 200 which put the flash at 1/2 power. Normally, this camera stays at ISO 200, so I didn’t even think to look. I just knew that my shutter speed was 1/200 which is the sync speed, and I had set the aperture to the f/11 that I had wanted. The first few frames told me that the smoke was just as dark as normal which meant that I was going to need to boost the exposure in post. I tried to bump the flash a third of a stop, but that wasn’t enough. I opened the aperture up to f/8 and that seemed to work, but I lost my depth of field. Had I really been on my toes, I would have bumped the ISO to brighten the image, but my mind was just not even entertaining looking at the ISO. This was as rookie a move as using depleted batteries. The end result was I was essentially shooting at the same settings that I have in the past thus nullifying my experiment.
The editing went kind of quick since there weren’t that many frames to go through, and a good many of them were totally black, or out of focus. I missed the moment on more than half of the frames which left only a handful that I wanted to actually attempt to process. My plan had been to work these as high key photos where I change the polarity of the tone curve. I started trying this technique with a couple of the more simple ones and kind of liked them. More often than not, I found that this approach didn’t work, and I ended up with all but two done in the regular low key technique that I have done before. For my first editing run, I ended up with four photos that I felt reasonably good about. They were split half and half on the high key and low key approaches.
As I reviewed the images for color, I started to not like any of them. I started to reprocess the high key ones as low key images and I liked them better, but things were not not great. I decided that I had better let them sit a while before I made a final judgement. I turned everything off and cleaned up the studio. I then went upstairs and watched a bit of television and grabbed dinner. Around 6:30 or so, I decided to come back downstairs and look at the photos once again.
I ended up trashing one of the earlier ones that was just too out of balance and I brought in another two that I had skipped before to be processed. I tweaked the three remaining ones and did similar processing on the new pair of images. Of course, the processing was left to what I was seeing in the frame and I wanted the colors to go along with that concept. The last two that were added were later in the session and were a bit more complicated than the earlier ones which took a little bit of time to fully understand. I went through several color combinations until I started to see a story developing within the frame. Sadly, none of these were as strong as the last time that I had done smoke photography, but I didn’t have near the issues the last time which I’m sure had a lot to do with the outcome here.
I was really hoping for a much more impressive shoot to be the last of the year, but I can’t dictate the weather which is the main concern with going out for photos. I did try a location the other day which has a lot of potential in Catawba County, but wasn’t able to talk directly to the owner. The good news is that I have left my contact information for the owner with a neighbor in hopes that he will call me back soon. He checks on the property a couple of times a week, so I imagine I am waiting on one of those visits when he will get my card. Hopefully, that trek will take place soon as there are at least four old rusty vehicles in some great positions to work with out there.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this studio session and the photos. Thank you for joining me on all of my treks throughout the year. Be sure to catch the first Behind the Camera of the new year on January 1st. That is the one where I will go through all that has happened through the year that I didn’t really cover in my regular blogs. It has been a rough year to say the least and I’m hoping that things will turn around in 2025.
Until next time….
