Smoke

From browsing Deviant art I came across some really astonishing pictures of what is described to be smoke. I was transfixed and also inspired by the amazing photography, so I decided to try my hand at it.

I also found a flickr group which is dedicated to this kind of image making, which you can see here

Since myself and Colin decided that it would be less than practical to take these photos in the studio we had to set up a rather ghetto scene in our flat. It consisted of a pinned up black tee shirt and a desktop lamp to attempt to light the smoke correctly. We used a spoon to disrupt the incense smoke and attempted to light the smoke with the desktop light.

Here are two of the original images that I decided to develop.



From here I had to alter the the contrast, white balance, levels, curves and I also erased some of the excess smoke in order to try and fully separate the background from the smoke.



From here I chose to invert the image and colour it using either the hue/saturation tool or the gradient tool on "overlay" mode In an attempt to imitate some of the pictures demonstrated on the flickr group.






For the final "Severance" image I decided to make selections using the polygonal lasso tool and a soft feather to colour individual parts of the smoke.

I think I managed this technique rather well, I could improve a lot simply by using a controlled environment such as the studio to capture the photos.