I have seen literally dozens of sites featuring great examples of smoke photography and in a way it has become a bit of a technique cliche but still one worthy of exploration. Equipped with an assistant half a dozen over powering incense sticks, camera and remote flash we set to work.

Using a bottle on a black background offered the camera something to focus on. The flash was placed slight behind the bottle to the right so the black background wasn’t illuminated.

Experimenting with different bottles resulted in some strange results. With the clear bottle we couldn’t create smoke plumes but had to actually pour the smoke out.

Once captured the photos were brought into Adobe Lightroom 3 for a bit of post production to bring out the colour and enhance the blacks.

If you are going to try this yourself I highly recommend a well ventilated room and only having one or two sticks lit at once !

You can see the full set of smoke photos over on flickr.