Week 1: Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

smoke

I have a list of 52 ideas for shooting this year and I plan to choose randomly, based on what's going on, what the weather has to offer and if I feel like working at it or being lazy.  This week I chose lazy.  

I thought of getting started last Sunday...it was a gorgeous, sunny day with awesome shadows on the snow (shadows is on the list for the year) but instead I stayed in my pajamas all day and didn't do a darn thing (except finally finish processing my India photos...yay!).  During the week after work I thought a couple of times that I should get Hermione out but I hadn't yet printed off the list and couldn't really remember all of the ideas.  This morning (yes, at the last possible moment again), I decided that I would do the fruit in fizzy water thing but I forgot to put those items on the grocery list.  So I read through the entire list trying to get some inspiration and settled on "smoke."  

I got out the black backdrop, the tripod, the flash...then...I couldn't remember how to do it.  After some starts and stumbles I realized that I had to use the flash off to the side of the smoke and thus required the use of the flash triggers.  Alas, last week I found out that the battery in the transmitter was dead but I didn't have a small enough screwdriver to get in and find out what kind of battery was needed.  This afternoon, with time a-wasting, I searched high and low for the mini screwdriver set that Levi has, unsuccessfully.  Finally Levi noticed I was looking for something and asked me what it was.  I told him and he said, "Oh, those are in my bedroom."   Huh.  I got the trigger open, made a trip to the Source and got the weird battery.  I got everything set up again and started shooting.  

The source of the smoke is some incense and the different colours are from using different coloured gels over the flash head.  The difficult parts were focusing (I eventually had to leave the camera on manual focus) and waiting for the smoke to rearrange itself back in front of where the camera was pointed.  

Once I got the photos up on the computer, I was fascinated with the variety of patterns in the smoke.  I could look at them over and over again and find new swirls, coils or interesting lines.  I included several shots to cover a variety of colours and some of the different swirl patterns.  I see a dragon, a face which could be Aladdin's genie and a baby reaching up with one arm.  What do you see?