Transcripts
1. Get Started: Hey everyone, In this
fun and create a class, I'm going to walk you through
the process of creating some stunning and unique
images with smoke and flash. I'm going to show you the tools
that you're going to need in order to accomplish
this technique. I'm going to show you how to
set up for success and avoid some common complications and hurdles that may
affect your outcome. After that, I'm going
to walk you through the process of calling these images and going over some basic edits
to improve them. And then we're gonna get into a little extra creative fun and Adobe Photoshop for some
really cool results that you can be proud of. This is an indoor or
photo opportunity that anyone can try. So let's go have some fun.
2. Tools and Preparation: Okay, so you are obviously
going to want your camera, be it a mirrorless or DSLR. You're going to want some
incense and something to hold the incense just to
make sure that you don't drop ashes over
anything important, lighter or matches, and
you're going to need a flash. Now I recommend a flash cord that you can attach
to your camera, as well as the flash
so that you can use the flash off camera. It's very important that you use the font flush off camera, and I'll explain that in a bit. But you can also
set up the flash as a slave or a secondary flash, and allowing the flash on
your camera to trigger it, which is the method that
you'll see me using. What you'll also probably
need is a remote release. I recommend one of these just in order to make life a
little bit easier for you. And it's really good to have the camera on a
nice solid tripod. You should make sure
that every source of wind or a breeze is off. That includes ceiling
fans, check your windows, open doors, AC running
or anything like that. Okay. So I was set up vertically with
portrait orientation. That's because the smoke
is going to be going upwards as it rises
to the ceiling. And so you'll want to maximize the amount that
you get in the frame. I was shooting in. Shutter priority, but
aperture priority or manual or will
work equally as well. Try a low or a medium ISO, I did experiment with my ISOs, and I also experimented
with my apertures and try at least one 150th of a
second in order to start. And so you can make
sure that you're freezing all of the
motion in the smoke. I used a remote release to make things a little bit easier on me and I'm of course, on a tripod. And I used the pop-up
flash on my camera in order to trigger
the handheld flash, which I held close to the smoke. It's very important
to have some sort of black cloth or sheet hanging behind it and you can tape it to the wall or
tack it to the wall. If you don't have something
that actually hold it up, you can drape it over a
piece of, I don't know, huge cardboard or something
and lay it up against a lot, up against a wall,
anywhere anyway, just to make it nice and
dark behind your smoke and create some distance between your incense and this cloth. You do not want to risk
any sort of a fire hazard. Okay, let's go have some fun.
3. The Process and Tips for Success: Okay, so when you are going to want to set up your incense, it's a good idea to get it
as straight as possible. Sometimes using one
of these little cones instead of a long stick
is a little easier. You tend to get a thicker
stream of smoke and it's pretty much
always guaranteed to be going straight
up into the air. Makes sure that
you are focused on the very tip of that incense. Focus manually, if
at all possible, it's going to be difficult for autofocus to focus on that is considering it's
something that's dark Typically right in front
of your dark background. That way, the smoke is
gonna be going straight up in the air and it
should all be in focus. Okay, you're just
going to want to hold the flash off to
one of the two sides. And you don't, you
don't want to eliminate the background stream there. So you're definitely
going to want to keep returning to your camera, checking the LCD and
making sure that you're not getting too much
light on the background. And if you do notice
that and reposition where you're holding your
flash and try again, because this is gonna be
a lot of trial and error. Every once in awhile
I didn't notice that I was lighting up
my background a little too much and had to reposition
your kind of finding a balance between keeping that flash out of the frame
and lighting it up enough. So keeping it close
enough to light it up, but far enough away. So that does not
actually getting into your frame being aimed
directly into the camera. Here, I actually noticed that when I raised the
flash bounce card, I got a better
result and I started having much more
consistent success. Here. I'm actually
using that little card as a little bit of a
breeze because you can actually alter the way the smoke behaves by giving it just
a little bit of a push. And you can see you get very
different results with that.
4. Finding the Best Ones: Okay. As you can see, you end up with a lot of photos and I have
already deleted 60 or 70 practice shots that
ended up with absolutely nothing showing up
until I figured out my flash and my ISO
and shutter speed, all of those settings to get
them correct to the point where I could actually
get the smoke captured. Okay, so then what I do is I go through and I
call images out. So anything that
has what I consider an interesting pattern that
maybe isn't repeated a lot. So I get, I get these little
curly patterns quite a bit. And so if the little
curly patterns aren't really tight and defined, I probably will
just skip that one. This one had what looked like a little piece of
macaroni to me. So I added a little
one-star rating to that. Anywhere where you
see something, you find clouds like
shapes and clouds. Anywhere where I see
something that jumps out at me as a familiar shape. So this looks to me a
little bit like a dolphin. The nose right here
and just the way that the Mellon of the
dolphins head is. And the way that it
curves around here, and then this little bit right here almost looks like a tail. So that is something
that in Photoshop, I might take the time to
play with a little bit more. So those are the things
that I look for. And in this one I actually
see, I see a duck. There's this little eye
and there's his bill, and it's almost perfectly
shaped like a duck. So that's something else
that I may work with. So don't keep them all. You're never, ever, ever
going to use them all. And you can see here that
sometimes my flash didn't fire. I fired the flash in a way that lit up the
background too much. I remember at least once
it kinda fell loose out of my hand and let the background
instead of the smoke. So you're positioning on that flash is really,
really critical. So these images were
all taken at one, one-sixtieth of a second. F5.6 ISO 100. I raised the ISO a little
bit later just to see if I would get something a
little bit different in order to allow myself a little
bit more depth of field. So let me see if
I can find those. Here. I raised the ISO to 1,000 so that I
could shoot at F 13, but kinda maintain the
same shutter speed. You definitely want a
shutter speed that's fast enough to freeze the
smoke in motion, maybe a little bit of a blur. It's fun to experiment, experiment with a slightly
longer shutter speed with the flash and see if that makes any difference as far as the
aesthetics are concerned, whether you like it or not. But you end up with a
lot to choose from. And just have fun. When I'm done with the culling process because I'm not going to
keep all of these and this is just a
system that I use quite frequently for
all of my photography, is an easy way to remove
the stuff that you're just, you just know you're
not going to use. So I after I've given everything that I want to at least
take a second look at, not necessarily
keep permanently, but at least take
a second look at I'll give it a one-star rating
and then I'll come up to the filters here and say unrated and anything that hasn't
gotten even a single star. So here you can see my flash snuck in there
and here it's mostly just a straight
line or something that's just like I have three or four that
are similar to this. I don't need them all. Things that lit up the
background too much. You can see where my
flash was just kinda aimed off and I
don't need those. Those are going to
require more work in post-processing and I
don't need more work. I've got plenty to choose from. I'm going to hold the
Shift key and select the top one that is unrated. I'm going to click
the Delete key. And I'm going to say
delete from disk. And then I'm going to come
back and turn the filters off so I can go back and see all
the ones that are leftover. So let's see how many
did I actually keep? Do that? Hold the Shift key. I ended up keeping 95 of them. Okay, If I can't find a
good photo in 95 images, I'm doing something
terribly wrong. Anyway. That's my culling process for the smoke images and pretty much any other photos as well.
5. Basic Editing Process: Okay, so let's talk about just basic adjustments
that you want to do to do most of these images. So if you've done the
image capture correctly, you should have a very dark, if not completely
black background and your smoke
should be well lit. So that's that's
processed number one. So this image not
captured correctly. I, I've messed that up. I messed that one up
a little bit too. So this is one of the reasons why when I was
capturing the images, I was holding the flash
right next to it and then taking a shot and then going back
and reviewing what I, what I got and saying, alright, I'm aiming the flash
in a different direction. And that's when I ended up using the little bounce card
to try and prevent some of the light from
hitting that backdrop. So if you have captured these, well, this is what
you should have. You should have a
bunch of images with a dark background and white
smoke or are relatively blue. Sometimes there's a different
white balance issue, but don't worry about that. If you were shooting in raw, you can change the
white balance. So if you want a
warm these up or coolies off, you absolutely can. I'm going to double-click
that to go back to neutral. But my advice is to just do some very basic
adjustments to this because don't worry about
the histogram being dark. It's just representative
of what you have here. So you've got a very
dark background, a lot of your histogram,
the weight of your history. I'm going to be over here. You just want to make sure
that you're not blowing any of those highlights. So I'm going to hold the Shift key and
double-click the highlights, but that actually
brings them down. So I don't want to do that. I want to actually make sure that my highlights
are nice and white. Let's hold the Shift
key and double-click the whites instead,
and that alone. So here's a little before
and after just gave it a little bit of a boost
to the smoke itself. And if I hold the Shift key and double-click the black slider, it's going to bring that
down a little bit as well. Now, if I wanted to completely
make that background black and go negative
100 on the blacks. Yeah, that disappears, but
I did lose a little bit of my smoke in there and
I don't want to do that. So I can I can do
that Just enough. Because I can always, I can
always crop this out or clone some darker area onto here to make that area
a little bit darker. If I want to keep the
image exactly like this. If I crank up the vibrance, you can actually see that
this smoke does have a very blue or cyan tint to it. If you wanted to enhance
that, go for it. If you wanted to come down to the HSL slider and take the
hue of the cyan and green. In blue. You can change the blue
and make it pink or green. If you wanted to turn
it into green smoke, you absolutely could
or you can do that in Photoshop as well
in Camera Raw or any other photo editing
program really that has access to hue,
saturation and luminance. If you wanted to crop
and rotate this to get a straight up and down image
that filled the frame. You can absolutely do that. That is not a problem. That looks pretty cool. Would make a really
interesting print two up on your wall. You could add some sharpening
to it, but it's really, I really don't think it's
necessary since you were using The Flash and you should have a decent shutter speeds. So when I zoom in here, these details should
be nice and sharp. I thought that was on my screen, that's actually part of
the background there. So those are things
that I would like to probably deal with
is getting rid of little spots on my background and that's
super easy to take care of. Spot healing here to
get rid of all of these little little
imperfections. I'm just holding down
the space bar to grab the hand tool so I can
move it around a little bit. There you go. Okay, so let's bring
this into Photoshop and maybe try some
more fun stuff. I'm going to start by
duplicating my background just so I don't mess
anything up there. And so let's do something
else that you can do. You can add a hue, saturation and luminance
layer in here as well. If you didn't want to do
that within Lightroom, I can change the color to
pretty much anything I want. You can make it a straight
up black and white by desaturating it 100%. I'm just going to
double-click on both of these and you can again make it
brighter, a little bit darker. Add some curves, anything you want in here, It's
Photoshop, right? So let's, let's
make this a little, maybe purple or pink, lavender. There we go. Let's just go pink. Here's something else that's kinda fun to make sure you're selecting the actual
image copy and not the, the image layer and not
be hue saturation layer. And go to Image Adjustments
and in verdict. And then you get this
inverted color here. And then you can come back up to the HSL and change it again. If we wanted that, wanted to
maybe on a white background. That's pretty cool.
Let's rotate this. Actually, let's do this. Okay, I'm gonna go
ahead and flatten this. Then I'm going to
duplicate my background. So I right-click and I hit
flatten and then I'm just grabbing this image and dragging it down to the new layer. So now I have a background copy, or you can just
right-click and say duplicate this layer and
you'll get the same thing. So I'm going to change the name of those by
double-clicking and I'm call it mirror just
so I know what it is. So I'm going to make sure
that the mirror layer is selected. And I'm going to say Edit,
Transform, Flip Horizontal. Now this one's facing this way and that one's
facing that way. I'm going to come up
to Image Canvas Size. And I'm going to change this
from pixels to percent. And I'm going to make
the width to 100%. I'm going to anchor it
on the top right corner. And click Okay. Now I'm going to select
both layers and hold the Shift key and click
on the bottom layer so they are both selected. And I'm going to come up
to Layer align left edges. And now they're mirrored. Very cool. So let's crop this to get
rid of the excess space. Now we have a mirrored image. Let's make sure that mirrors
right in the middle. Very cool. Crop off some of
this bottom here. Very, very nifty. So again, just something a
little bit more fun that you could do within Photoshop.
If I wanted to. Maybe use this on a website
or something like that, Let's rotate the canvas right here and go
ahead and crop it. So something like
this would make kind of a nifty, actually, let's add down here kind of
an interesting banner photo. Gonna go ahead and use content aware to fill in
these corners here. Click Okay, there we go. So that did not do that good
of a job right up in here. But if I wanted to
put some text up here and have this smoky
thing down at the bottom. That's, that would work. So if I select the J
tool for the type, the letter J That's selects my spot healing get fixed that
little corner right there. And then type T for text. And I can say, let's make this a little bit bigger because that's terrible. We go cool. I can't spell. Here's my cool website banner. There we go. Move this. There you go. Left justified there. And move it and there you go. Here's my cool website
banner or my ad or whatever it is that you
want to do with these. So that's a good, good old-fashioned stock
photo right there. Something that has got something interesting and some whitespace, empty space for text makes
for great stock photography. So anyway, just
some basic things, some slightly advanced things. And the next video
is going to get into some super-duper creative
stuff that you can do. I'll see you there.
6. Building a Unique Image: Now, if I have photographed these in the best way possible, so I use my flash, I made sure that my
background was nice and dark. The editing process alone, if you're just going to
work on a single image, shouldn't be complicated. So I'm going to bring this
into the develop module. And this one, I consider a
little bit underexposed. I want to see a little bit
more brightness in this smoke. And so I'm going to take my
whites and drag them up. If I go too much, clearly I've overdone it. If I hold the Shift key and double-click on
the white slider, it will actually
automatically set it at the maximum value
before it gets clipped. And so I'll use
that quite a bit. And then I'll hold the Shift key and double-click the blacks. And really it only needed
to go down negative three. So because everything's
mostly black behind here. So now I have this
nicely exposed. So here is a before and after. It just looks much better, much more vibrant and bright. I'm gonna do the
same thing here. Hold the Shift key, double-click
on the white slider, hold the Shift,
click Shift key and double-click the black slider. And it really didn't
bring it down very much. And you can see that I've
got a little bit too much white up in here,
but that's okay. I'm only really concerning
myself with what is happening with the portion of
the image that I want to potentially use
someplace else. So say I wanted to actually turn this into a
dolphin in Photoshop. And I actually kinda like
this right here too. So let's see. I've got the nose, I've got the melon and I've got the tail. I might manipulate
that a little bit with the Warp tool there. But let's see if we can't find an image in here
that looks like, oh, I don't know, splashed water or something like a wave. Maybe. This image right here. I actually created this after I kinda waved my hand at the, at the incense and made
it squiggle around and become a mess because I wanted
at least one kinda fluffy, fluffy cloud looking
messy smoke photo. Because a lot of these,
they've got really, really awesome patterns
and things like that, but you don't get a
lot of messy photo MSI smoke photos like this. So I'm going to bring
that one into Photoshop. So I'm going to
right-click and say Edit in and bring
it into Photoshop. I'm going to go
back to my dolphin and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to bring that
one into Photoshop. I'm just going to
go through here and see if there's anything else that I think might
complement that image. And I can, I can bring
as many as I want in there and we end up using the ones that
I find appropriate. So this one, if I
look at it sideways, these look like waves to me. So I'm going to bring
that one into ok, so I have a bunch in here. And what I'm going to do
is I'm going to create a new document so
that I can just have a blank slate as
something to create with. I'm going to say File New. I'm going to make
it really large. Like 6,000, 6,000 pixels. I can always crop it later. 300 ppi, 16 bit at least. And I'm going to make
that black zeros 00 on the RGB. Okay. So there's my blank document. Where is my dolphin?
There it is. So I'm going to take the legislation I select or just yeah, let's
let's select. Well, no, I'll do the move tool. Alright, I'm going to
take the move tool, type the letter V as in Victor. Click and drag it up here, drag it back in and let it go. And lo and behold, even though it's a
photo and you can see the straight edge here
because it's black on black. And my image is actually
6,000 pixels tall. You really can't see
the dividing line unless I move it right
there, which is cool. So let's do that and let's put
him up here because I want the waves to be behind him
and I can always move him around if I want to later on, because every time
that I do this, I'm going to get
a different look. Let's rotate this one that way because I
like these little, they look like waves now. So I'm going to take this and I'm going to
do the same thing. Where is it There it
is. Bring it down here. I'm going to command T that. And turn it. And I'm gonna
put it right around there. Click Okay, and that one, I'm going to add a layer
mask and take my brush. Let's do just a
normal soft brush and remove majority of it. Okay, and I think what I'm
gonna do is I'm actually going to do that again. As another layer. Keep these waves
over here and we lower the opacity so I can
kinda see what I'm doing here. Let's hold the Shift key. I'm going to change these a
little bit so that they're not a completely
repeated pattern. Okay, and I'm going
to add a mask to that because I definitely want
to brush this effect out. Local Phi. Okay? Now it looks a little bit
different than, than this one. So as long as I've made
some subtle changes, I've kind of avoided some
of that repeating pattern. Alright? So I don't think I
need that one anymore. So let's close that. And I kinda like this
little piece right here. Let's do this a
little differently. Let's grab a selection. And I'm going to grab
just that little heart-shaped piece right there. And I'm going to say Edit, Copy. And I'm going to
bring it up here. I'm going to say Edit, Paste. It puts that on, again, a new layer. And I'm gonna hit Command T to rotate this around a little bit. Let me lower the opacity. Hold the Shift key. This bigger. Kinda splash. We go. Alright, I need a dolphin fin. I need a thin right here. And I'm gonna do the same thing. Just crop that little piece out. Copy, paste. Alright, let's move. You need more of a solid
dolphin body here. So I need something that's got a little bit more
thickness to it. We are building a
dolphin is we are. Alright, so Command S. Okay, Here I have flattened all of
the layers because it was 1.4 gb into a single
background layer. But then I duplicated
that background layer because I want to use
the Liquify Filter. So I'm gonna go to
Filter Liquify. And I really just want to
define the tail a little bit. So if I make this too big, it's going to end up being
like an enormous fluke here, so I don't want that. So let's make this a little
bit more reasonable size. Maybe a little bit
bigger than that. Just pull this down
into a simple tale. Easy enough, right? And I'm going to extend
that fin a little bit. I don't want this to be
a little bit smaller. Go push there. And I'm going to want to push
this beak out a little bit, little bit more of a beak there. Maybe make his head just
a little bit bigger. There we go, looking
more like a, like an Atlantic
bottlenose dolphin. There.
7. Your Project: Okay, for your project, obviously I want
you to give this a go and see what you
can come up with. At the very least, try it and see if you
can get a well exposed, smoky image with a
very black background. If you want to take the time to review,
look through these. I'd love to see if you found any animals or fun
familiar shapes in there. Because I think that that is, I think it's just fun to do. So let me know if you see
anything interesting. If you want to take
it a step further, I'd love to see it. If you did something
a little bit more creative and kind of explored Photoshop a little
bit to create something new and maybe even do
a fun mirrored image. But this would be a lot of
fun for you guys to do. And I hope the processing
isn't too hard. But again, you don't have
to go crazy with it. You can keep it pretty simple and just do some basic edits like this or take it
just a little bit further or even a
little bit further. It is up to you, but I look forward to
seeing your results. Have fun.
8. Final Thoughts: Well, I hope you enjoyed
that as much as I did. Don't forget, this takes
a little bit of practice, but I hope that I provided
you some of the tips in the process video to help you avoid some of the
difficulties that may happen, just relax and enjoy
these new techniques and add them to your box of
photographic tricks. Don't forget to check out my other indoor
photography classes for more creative fun. And I can't wait to see all of the results that you guys
create with these images.
Kate Silvia, Photographer and Artist
