Smokey

Sometimes you have to do things when you are in the mood.

For some reason I took out my camera and started taking some snaps of cars whooshing past on the road and trying to get a snap with trailing red and yellow lines. But then, that wasn't too exciting. That's when I remembered that there was once this discussion on trying to photograph smoke and how tricky it could be. I wanted to give it a shot now that I had a little more command on how each component of a camera contributed to a snap. For sure, I needed some source of smoke. Thanks to my roommate's parents who came here a few weeks back, there were some incense sticks lying around. I had read about having external lighting for smoke photography. For that I pulled out this small laptop table that was lying around the house and it had an LED lit lamp. I thought that was exactly what I needed and then started wandering around in search of a dark place. Now the only way I could find that was in the bathroom. I had never imagined that I would have a bed top study/laptop table an incense stick and my big fat camera all visiting the bathroom at the same time, but there I was, in the dark attempting something I had never tried before. I know for a fact that if I had waited for everyone to go to bed to get the room for myself I would have lost interest and never taken this up.

I don't really know how long that stick was burning for, but in that time I managed to take about a hundred and fifty snaps each with different setting and angles and what not. It was good fun doing that. Waiting for patterns to form and seeing how different light and camera angles gave different effects to the snaps and also the fact that I was stuck in the bathroom with my camera :D.

So then, things I learnt.

Actually, I didn't get good snaps that day. They were either grainy or blur or just plain black. I knew I was doing something wrong, I always thought that smoke needed little light and all that, but I was wrong. You need a good amount of light to capture smoke. But that doesn't mean you try to work with an over head light bulb or so. It needs to be bright and directed.

I did some reading up on smoke photography the next day and found a good article on it. Here is the link to that article...

http://www.beyondmegapixels.com/2009/07/smoke-photography-101-without-an-off-camera-flash-that-is-part-1/