Miscellaneous
Read MoreDay 34. August 12, 2010. Wait a minute, you may be thinking to yourself. Isn't Day 33 supposed to be August 11? Err...yes. Yesterday ended up overflowing, so I just did an extra-awesome shoot today, and posted two pictures.
I've always wanted to try smoke photography, so I did some reading online, and went for it. It was a lot easier than I though, but it did take patience and careful attention to detail. There's a picture of my setup here http://lekan.smugmug.com/gallery/11925214_AspKu/#968172745_2urEf). I used my 100mm macro, and manually focused on a match tip held in place by a mic stand with a clip head. I hung a black cloth on a chair to use as a backdrop. Lighting was from camera right for the first few, then switched to camera left. For the smoke to be in focus, I had to stop down to f/11. Smoke also moves surprisingly quickly, so balancing the shutter speed with flash recycle speed with flash power was fun to juggle. Eventually, I settled at a 1/20 shutter, and just varied the flash power, usually between 1/32 and 1/8. Near the end of the shoot, I had enough experience predicting when an interesting smoke pattern would appear that I increased power to 1/4. In total, I used about 30 matches and 420 exposures, which resulted in 17 I developed. Here are my two quick favorites.
(Update: OK. I'm not sure why smugmug does a terrible job of recompressing the dark areas on its jpg's. If you're interested in an image without all the ugly artifacts everywhere, just let me know and I'll email it to you.)
100mm f/2.8L IS Macro @ f/11. 1/20s. ISO 200. 580EX II from camera left and above match tip, 1ft away, at 1/4 power.
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