Twice a year, I give a demonstration and talk at the local camera club, where my love of photography started when I was only 17 years old. It’s my way of saying thank you and hopefully encouraging the next generation of photographers. Indeed, my own 17-year-old son Andy inspired these unusual images. He wanted to do some Fine Art Photography with a difference and came up with the idea of smoke after having seen the images of Stoffel de Roover on the Internet.
These are the results of a really fun session we had in my studio experimenting with josticks. I think his images are superb, and I’ve asked him to write a few notes about how he did them for those of you who might like to have a go. He deliberately hasn’t given the images titles, as we think it is more interesting for people to see things in them for themselves -like looking at clouds – without being influenced by anyone else’s ideas.
We used a medium telephoto lens on a Canon 1D Mk3.
You need a powerful light source from either a flashgun or direct sunshine through a window. The room needs to be well ventilated otherwise the images will be confused and hazy as the smoke builds up.
  
Smoke is made up of lots of particles and so gives the appearance of grain. We don’t want to increase this further so use an ISO of 100. It moves very quickly so we also need a fast shutter speed to stop the action. We used 1/200 to catch the smoke plumes. A small aperture of f11 was used to provide as much depth of field as possible.
We used auto focus to focus on the tip of the jostick and then turned the camera to manual focus. If you don’t do this, the camera will try to refocus every time you press the shutter. To make the swirls, we experimented with different objects from gently blowing the smoke to using spoons. You need to take plenty of photos, as you’ll probably use only one in every hundred images!
  
In PhotoShop we cropped the photos for good composition and then desaturated the images. Then you adjust the levels, holding down the alt key while adjusting the blacks to get rid of any specks. You then need to decide whether the background is going to be black or white – depending on the colour you’re going to give the smoke and the mood you want to create.
If white you’ll need to invert the image (this turns the background from black to white). Then for either background, alter the hue and saturation using the colourize option to change the colour of the smoke and achieve your desired effect. For an interesting presentation, create a five-pixel stroke line around the image using the same colour as the smoke. Finally add a couple of inches to the canvas size. And that’s all there is to it!
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My 17-year-old son, Andy’s studying photography at college. For his first assignment ‘favourite places’ he chose to photograph our town at night. His aim was to show the isolation many young teens feel and how they don’t just hang around the centres in gangs. Many take to the quiet areas of the town at night simply because they have nothing better to do and feel they even have little in common with their peers. He also wanted to show some of the attraction of the streets to teenagers – a sort of rough glamour or seediness – a strange beauty that the streets have at night.
He didn’t have a model readily available, so I found myself being dragged in to help – hoody and all. It was a strange and eye opening experience to be on the other side of the camera and gave me a really good insight into how very important clear communication and rapport between model and photographer is. I have to say Andy’s not bad for a beginner!
We had a great deal of fun – and entertained the town’s CCTV monitors as the sight of me doing exaggerated walks, followed by my son with his camera and tripod and my wife as assistant with the video light wasn’t something they get to see every day.
   
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