It's been very rainy here—it's August and most of Anchorage is still waiting for summer. It's starting to look hopeless. Confined to the indoors, I've been spending some time making still-lifes including some smoke photographs. If you've been following on Facebook, you've probably already seen a couple. These are very easy to make, require minimal gear, and you can end up with some surprisingly beautiful results. I thought I'd share a quick recipe for making similar photos.

What you need:

Camera

I used a Nikon DSLR with a 60mm macro lens.

Strong light source to backlight the smoke.

Off-camera electronic flash works very well. I used a Nikon SB900 with a snoot made of cinefoil to prevent flare.

Dark background

I used a big folding reflector with a black cover.

Source of smoke.

I used matches, some people like incense.

The setup:

Everything is set on manual. The flash is at 1/8 power giving an exposure of about f/16. Since the room is dark, the shutter speed is not relevant—it is set at the max sync speed of 1/250 to insure that no stray light makes it into the exposure. The lens is pre-focused on the area I expect the smoke to travel—autofocus is pretty useless here. The raw files were corrected for white balance and contrast in Lightroom, but other than that, these are straight shots. (The first set of two below was made by leaving the shutter open and popping the flash multiple times as the smoke moved)

Some Examples: