I love the dynamics of fluids. And that’s the only reason for the other day’s experiment: Abstract Smoke photography. It’s quite simple to achieve. All I used was my camera, a flash with honeycomb grid and some matches for the smoke. Here’s my setup:

I placed my subject (matches) in front of a dark background. My flash was positioned on the right side at a 1/16th of power on which I attached a honeycomb grid to prevent the light from spilling on the background (If you don’t have a honeycomb grid you could just move away from the background). I set the camera to manual focus at around f/5.6 – f/8 and the shutter speed at 1/100th. Then it’s just a matter of lighting up the matches, blow them out and shoot the smoke. In post, I used photoshop to invert the photos to get a white background and dark grey smoke. For the colours, it’s a matter of playing with curves and blending modes. And that’s it! Check out the result below.