Smoke

It was thirty below outside, so I wanted to shoot in the comfort of my cabin. I googled indoor photography ideas and found some smoke art, which was delightfully cheesy. One hour (and one trip to WalMart) later, I had a bag of incense cones. Myrrh, according to the bag. It's brown and smells like incense. 

Re-used the macro set-up (fluorescent lights and black background) but shot with a normal lens. The smoke moves too quickly to really compose shots. You just have to watch for interesting things to start happening and then fire off a few shots in continuous mode:

f/4.5

1/180 sec

ISO 100

50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)

f/8

1/180 sec

ISO 200

31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

f/4.5

1/350 sec

ISO 100

31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

These required a lot of work in photoshop. All are heavily cropped, the background is heavily burned, and I played with contrast and shadowing a lot to get detail out of the smoke. Several people told me they like these, which is nice, but I can't help feeling that photos like this are little more than lava lamps that don't change.