Week 7 (February 12th - 18th) | Pictures 13, 14, & 15

Pictures first! Setup information after . . .







All 3 images:
Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 105mm f/2.8 macro
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/32th power
Exposure: manual

This has definitely been my favorite week yet! First off, let me give credit where credit is due. This was not my idea. I saw this on flickr and found a link to a youtube video explaining how to do this. In previous weeks I have tried to take concepts and make them into something of my own. But this week, I did not do that and I won't pretend that I devised this clever idea on my own. Here is the video.

I would show you the setup picture here, but I have such a lovely blog of pretty pictures that showing you my crappy basement floor and beyond cheap setup would just put a big ugly picture here. If you want to see it (you definitely should check it out) - it's here. Just to be clear, what you see in that picture is a candle sitting on our basement floor. A speedlight on the right set up on a cut up diaper box (for a future OCF project). A white piece of foam-core behind the flash to keep the flash from spilling onto my black background. And a black piece of poster board propped up on another piece of white foam-core. Another super cheap, super easy project. Although, I must admit the large glowing box on the left is one of my softboxes. According to the youtube video you just need enough light on the smoke to help your camera get focus. So the softbox was probably overkill. But I happen to have it, so I used it. Definitely not necessary for the project.

This was so easy and so cool!

Just one more "disclaimer" - I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to try not to use any Photoshop for processing these images, but the images above were processed with Photoshop to invert the black background/white smoke and then to add color.

Here is an example of what the first image looks like directly out of Lightroom:



Cool stuff! I have no idea how I'm going to keep this up for another 45 weeks! :)