Hi my name is John Arnold and today I'm going to show you how to take smoke pictures. Now this is something that has been done before, I'm sure you've seen it around but as always with these things the challenges to try and make them our own. Let me first of all just show you the basic setup you need, it's dead simple just to take some smoke pictures. So first of all here's what you need, you need an incense stick, I have here like a whole ton of them, that was a couple of quid from some hippie shop and so an incense stick obviously some matches to like them. This here is a little ball of play dough, don't tell the kids I stole their play dough. Obviously I'll need a camera, on the camera I have got the Canon 100mm macro lens, that's a pretty good lens to be doing this with. I'm working it sort of about a foot away from where the smoke will be. Obviously I have a flash gun, we're going to need that and to go with the flash gun we're also going to need some remote triggers. So I got a pair of these are, these are cheapo pocket wizards essentially, all they do is you put one on the camera, you put one on the flash and when you press the shutter button on the camera it triggers the flash, dead simple, couldn't be easier really. And these were I don't know 25 pounds, they were dirt cheap, I got them on Amazon.com. They don't synchronize terribly fast, you're not going to want to use them for a lot of portraiture. I have been using these for my portraiture actually but the fastest I can think of is 160th of a second. If I go any faster than that I get black bars along one edge of the shot. So these are not great for that but they work, they're okay. And certainly good value for money at 25 quid. So what I've got is this is the little standy thing that the camera, that the flash came with for standing it up. So that allows it to stand on the desk like that. If you put the trigger in between the stand and the flash and while we're talking about these young row things there's no, there's no hot shoe lock on these on these triggers which is kind of annoying. So they do tend to fall out if you're not careful. Don't forget to turn it on before you put the flash in there we go that's the flash on. Turn the flash on. I'm going to put that up to one side and what I'm going to do is. I'm actually going to work a little elevated so I've got a couple of boxes here. I've got a case in a box and I'm going to put things on those. So one trigger on top of the camera like so like that. Turn that thing on. Turn the camera on. Oh, card fault. Let's just sort that out. Format okay. Right so while that formats what else do we need? We've got the triggers, we've got the flash, we've got the, do you got the incense stick. Now the other thing that might be useful this is a little desk lamp here. Actually the shots I've taken that I'm using to show this I didn't actually use a desk lamp. You can live without the desk lamp but if you put a desk lamp at the side it does just help you focus on the smoke. Now the other thing you're going to need which is very important is a black background and if I have here a sheet of black foam you can use black card you can use a black sheet or something. Anything you can get there's a black that goes behind the shot and what I've been doing is I've been blue-tacking this to the wall. Now this isn't very big. It does rather limit the space you can work in but you can still get great smoke pictures with this. So that's already important. We're going to put that up at the back. One final thing that I have been using you can you can live without this what you can do instead is use cardboard but this is a rogue flashbender and what you do is you strap this around your flash like so. Click on you slide. See there you go there's the foot falling off again and what this does is this allows you to shape the light so you can move these side bits around and bend the it's got sort of bendy struts in it and you can use this to form the light and what we're trying to achieve here the very important thing about the way you arrange this light let me get that stand off the floor. The important thing here is that when the flash fires you don't want the light spilling onto that black background so let's get this all set up and I'll show you how we take some pictures. Okay so I'm all set up all that remains is just to light the incense stick so let's just light that. Right this incense is called concentration and boy could I use some of that. So you can see what I've done here I've got the side lights on there trying not to get the light spilling on the on the background but it is going to light the smoke as it goes up and I've moved my flash gun pretty close to the incense stick here that's because the closer the light is to the incense the closer the light is to the smoke the brighter that smoke is going to be in my shot. So I've got my camera set up I am at the moment at ISO 400 F5 and one 60th of a second of course because that's my synced bead of these triggers so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take some test shots see how this looks I've got my flash at a quarter power at the moment so I'm going to just focus in on the incense stick that's going to give me a good starting depth of focus position of focus and I'm going to just move back and forth until I get the smoke in focus there. Right and that's looking pretty good I've got a pretty solid black background I've got smoke that's coming up to about halfway up the histogram it would be nice for that smoke to be a little brighter so I'm going to just try moving that flash a little closer see if I can get closer without it going in shot looks like I can smoke disam interesting stuff there right now here we go so here is the kind of shot I'm getting there's or not you can see that can you see the histogram we've got data that is up above the halfway point you can see a nice shape let me just pick switch to the there you go there's the actual shot I took you can see that the smoke is nice and bright in the shot the background is nice and dark I have got a little bit of light spilling onto the background so I'm going to just move the the flash around the back a little and I'm going to take a load more pictures while it's all being kind to me check out that wand very nice one of the other things that can happen when you when you take in these pictures is you sometimes get the flash bouncing into the lens of the camera as well so it's also useful to be able to try and keep the flash out of the out of the front of the camera as well as off the background here's here's another great one we just took another nice one so obviously the next step is to take these pictures out of the camera get them onto the computer and see what we can do to post process them and make them look beautiful I'm going to take some more pictures Photo walk through was a free online video show about photography and digital photo editing using Photoshop and Lightroom please help support the show by using our sponsors promo codes or by passing the promo codes onto your friends join the photo walk through community find all the old shows and subscribe to the new ones for free at photo walkthrough.com