The intro to this section calls it a place to relax and talk about "other things" so here is a bit of an essay I did a while back on something totally out of the box for me.

Another photographer put up a few of these and got me really interested in trying out a few for myself. I wanted to try it with a fog machine, but that didn't work out.

The things that come out of the smoke range from just beautiful to just plain creepy and everything in between.

The basics of my set up are:
Black Velveteen BG about 10 feet beyond the source of the smoke.
Two remote flashes with colored gels (though with PS you can start with white smoke and make it any color you want). One positioned to the side and slightly angled away from the BG. The other, I move around, but I think I like it right at the bottom of the smoke shooting upwards.

Typically 1/30th with -3EV flash. Aperture varies.

Here is a series I shot a while back and worked on last night.

The original shot doesn't look like much:



Then the result after a selection, rotation, clean up of stray color and some targeted dodge & burn.



And finally, because I'm never finished playing, a little more dodge & burn plus a bit of playing with the smudge tool starting at a wider brush and narrowing down to "add a little something" Do you see it?




I think I'll title the result "Torment."

A couple more that are not necessarily related to one another.


Smoke Kills:



The Wizard:



Hope you like them,
jim

very cool Jim. Now I want to experiment. That could be very artistic.........

Hey Jim,

These are indeed very cool. I would love to see the non PS's versions and get a bit of background on how you made them into these pieces.

James

Thanks James,

The top file is straight from the camera. The rest are manipulated to various degrees. I'll pull up the RAW files on one or two of them and do a "conversion only" post. tomorrow.

"Torment" was just a crop, rotate, burn and then use the smudge tool to add some fangs.

The "Skull" in the skull and bones looks exactly as it did from the camera save for a levels adjustment, and copying it into a new file. The "bones" were pulled from another image. Basically, I had a "piece of smoke" that looked like one end of the bone and I duplicated it a few times, rotated it and blended it together to form the whole thing.

The Wizard, is very close to as shot. I did a levels adjustment and some dodge & burn along what looked like folds in a wizard's robe to me.

This one (tell me what you think it is, opinions vary) has not ben manipulated other than levels and a crop.



This one came from two images. One looked like a throne and the other some sort of wild alien warrior king thing. I combined them and ran them through some filters like glowing edges and a few others I don't remember at the moment.

Sorry it took a while, but here are the unedited images for the skull & bones and the wizard. These are from the RAW files exported from Lightroom as web-sized JPGs. No PS at all.

These are very unique. I really like the one called Torment.

LOL, Jim, you are a much better artist than I am. I don't think that I could do this even on my best of days.

James

Thanks James.

The cool thing is that I didn't really do much other than press the shutter a lot. My "smoke" folder has 352 images in it right now and I'd say only 10 of those are worth looking at.