A Creechure’s PhotoBlog

Been awhile since I last blogged, but I honestly haven’t been able to pick up the camera lately.  I finally got some free time this weekend, and decided to experiment with a concept that came to me as I was going to sleep the other night.  I had worked with incense in the past and was well aware of how cool and abstract they could look, but they normally remain just that, abstract.  I wanted to try and represent incense smoke as liquid, more specifically, red wine.  This photo was a challenge for several reasons.  For one, smoke isn’t denser than air (at least not the legal kind) and naturally wants to float up.  I tried holding the wine glass upside down, which worked to a degree, but the lighting of the wine glass was terrible.  My light setup was created with the incense in mind.  Lighting for incense smoke and lighting for a wine glass is very different.  Secondly, I knew I wanted to color the wine red, which meant that the smoke had to be shot by itself, so that I could isolate and color it in photoshop later in the process.  This meant that I definitely couldn’t include the wine glass in the picture.  Even if I did get dry ice or some other denser smoke, when I went to color the smoke, I would also be coloring the wine glass.  Both these factors, made me realize that I was going to have to rely on luck and my photoshop skills to create realistic looking liquid-smoke.

To start, I took tons and tons of pictures of incense smoke.  Light setup was very simple.  Ab800 camera right at 1/16 power and a white reflector on camera left.  A black piece of foam core was placed several feet behind.  After shooting the incense, I swapped out the black foam core background, for a white foam core background and the incense, for a wine glass.  Light setup was moved around a bit, adding a softbox to the AB800 camera right.  I also had a AB800 at full power behind the white foam core, pointing towards the camera.  Here is the original.

After shooting the wine glass, I shot the wine bottle.  Pretty much same light set up except with an additional bare light for fill.

Next came the photoshop work.  I combed through all my pictures and found a few that had promise.  They somewhat mimicked what liquid would do when being poured into a wine glass.  You can see the two major pieces of smoke I used below.

This is the process in photoshop from taking smoke on a black background to colored smoke on a white background.

For the final image, I added several more incense streaks to make the image a little more fun.  If the fun doesn’t work, I have a portrait variant without the other smoke trails.  Which one do you prefer?