POTW2012 - Week 2 - Orange

I had a few ideas bouncing around in my noggin for this one. With "orange" as the theme, I obviously considered oranges (and there's a bag upstairs now), a construction area (no shortage there), cigarette tips, things on fire, the usual.

I decided, however, to make an image that was my first impulse, and one that I'm sure everybody with a camera tries at some point - I shot smoke:



While smoke isn't orange, I did reckon I could take any decent captures into Photoshop® and make them orange. So there.

My first edit was boring - just a quick orange layer in "Color" mode and the smoke turned orange. Since that was tremendously underwhelming, I pulled a yellow to red diagonal gradient across the color layer instead. That's much more satisfying.

Setup for the shot is easy, if a bit stinky:



On the table are three burning incense sticks. Both big strobes are snooted, and blasting through the strobes to strike a black flag on the other side. The flag prevents any spill on the background.

The camera is set to manual, ISO100, 1/250, f/6.3, and 80mm (128mm in APS-C terms), and fired with a wired trigger. I grabbed over 100 frames, and this was one of the 20 or so keepers.

Two weeks down, but I don't think I'm done playing with these smoke shots yet.