Just learning how to do Smoke Art – quite pleased with the results from my first attempt.
If you want to have a go at this it’s quite easy, when you know how. You’ll need to be able to alter the aperture and shutter speed on your camera. You’ll also need an off camera flash – I use a Nikon SB900, a few Joss sticks and plenty of time (and plenty of memory cards). 
You’ll also need a matt black background. It involves placing the speedlight at 90 degress to the smoke with some home made barn doors attached so light doesn’t get reflected on the background. Its crucial to get a jet black background in your image.
Then just take loads of piccies and keep adjusting the settings until you’re nailing it. At present I find I’m getting best results when I let my on camera flash fire as well as the speedlight but it does mean the background gets a bit of reflection. I’ll post details here on exact setup as soon as I am 100% happy with the results. I think I’m 80% there at the moment.
These are my first attempt at Smoke Art. It's quite tricky...you need to get a jet black background with no reflection (thats the really hard part) and then you can mess about with the results in Photoshop (thats the easy part)
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