Smoke Trails

This week, my experimentation task at college was to photograph smoke trails. Ideally, doing this in a studio set up with proper lights and a back drop would work best, however I didn't have the time to book up the studio at college so I made my own set up at home.

I used two incense sticks (to make sure the smoke was thick), a black bed sheet for a background, my flashgun & a torch to light the smoke. It took a while to start to get some shots that I was happy with but after a lot of patience and trial & error, I got some final shots that I'm really pleased with. My camera settings for these were: ISO 100, 1/200 (Some 1/160) and f 6.5. I also had my camera on manual focus so that it was easier to focus on the smoke.

In Photoshop I changed the colours of the smoke to make them look more interesting & stand out against the black. Here are my favourites :-)

Words in Sparklers

I've spent the evening outside in the garden with my brilliant family who were willing to stand in the freezing cold for half an hour with me, making shapes and letters with sparklers for my text and image project.

I tried a few different things, some things worked really well whereas some things didn't work as much.

Here a few of my favourites :)

My Mum got confused on this one and spelt the 'S' the wrong way round!!!

I recently shot a wedding with a professional photographer and we tried out this technique on the day, check out the photographs here - https://www.facebook.com/BarefootPhotog/posts/845165362195113