Travel & Humanitarian Photos
I’ve wanted to have a go at producing one of these images of a smoky abstract for a while, since first seeing them on the Chromasia web site. They seem so other-worldy and the shapes produced by the smoke particles are often quite beautiful. It’s also interesting how we tend to want to find recognisable shapes in the smoky curves. I’ve seen faces and bodies, words and letters, musical notations and all manner of other things. I quite like this one and if you’re interested in my interpretation then I think that the top half resembles one of those political cartoon or Pink Floyd characters by Gerald Scarfe, there’s a big “S” that starts about half-way down and the bottom shape is a woman with her bottom on back-to-front. God, I hope there are no psychiatrists reading this.
Getting set up to produce these smoky abstracts isn’t that tricky. It’s just a case of getting a dark background, I have a piece of black card, positioning the camera about six feet away from it and placing an incense stick half-way between camera and background. As I don’t have a remote release for my flash at the moment I just drew the curtains and set the camera for a 1 second exposure at f/22 (ISO 800). I needed a long exposure to give me time to manually fire the flash and to give plenty of depth-of-field. Keeping the smoke sharp is the biggest hassle as movement of just one or two inches backwards or forwards can take it out of focus. Having lit the incense, I took about 200 shots (thank God for digital), of which only about 8 or 9 are both sharp and have interesting shapes.
When I’d settled on a shot that I liked, I altered the white balance to make the smoke look a little bluer. Interestingly, although there was only a single light source the smoke varied in colour so there were various tones to play with. In Photoshop I applied a V-shaped Curve Layer which inverted the colours, changing the black to white and the brown tones to blues. Lastly, I used the “Replace Colour” option to introduce the pink hues although because of the inverting curves layer I had to select a green colour at the opposite end of the spectrum to the pink that I wanted.