My next lil project involves taking a picture of a flame. At first I wanted to take a picture of a flame with smoke trailing up; but then after some trials, i noticed that a flame doesnt make nice smoke trails until after its put out. So I tried another method of getting the smoke:
I went into my bathroom with all the lighs out and put my mini tripod and camera on the counter, with a stick of inscence sticking out in front of it. I light the inscence and let the smoke trail up. Since it was pitch black, i used a flashlight to shine light on the smoke. I was hoping to get a good clear image of the smoke on a black background, but the smoke didnt show up. I tried shining the light from various angles but still didnt work. btw this was in macro mode too.
It depends on what is burning as to whether it makes a lot of smoke or not. My suggestion is to experiment with burning different kinds of materials to see which one produces the best kind of smoke. You can also do this in medium to low light with a black background, like a giant piece of poster board or cloth, and the smoke should show up quite well. Just try not to get burned :-) good luck.
Are you trying to get the flame and the smoke in the same shot? Or are you going to combine the flame and smoke in two layers? I'd be curious about how to photograph smoke, too. Seems that a drifting subject would need more light. The tripod can keep the camera still but the smoke is still going to move.
Thought I should bump this question since it was a valid one that got lost because of your posting mistake.
It looks like your already trying everything I would suggest (black background, lighting.. harsh lighting works sometimes). I tried to get smoke for my macro shot, but was very unsuccessful. I do notice that it comes up well on the lcd screen after I've taken the picture, but never really on my computer. I did get this one //www.deviantart.com/deviation/1434422/ but wasn't able to really recreate it for my macro shot. The lighting seems to be key. In the link above I used two flashlights, one on each side about a foot above the subject and shining down at about a 45 degree angle.
I think I achieved a similar shot to what you orginally described, where you had smoke trailing up from a flame, except it was slightly different.
The picture I took is here and I achieved it using a really long shutter speed, and blowing the candles out (while still taking the picture.
I used just a couple of desk lamps to light it. If you have any more questions, feel free to PM me.
I've found that backlighting smoke seems to work well. Some examples (using a desklamp, from memory):
In this case it was just a matter of lighting the tealight candles, blowing them out, and then taking a picture a second or so later when the smoke came out :)
IIRC, the light source was at about a 30 degree angle from the candle holder. I was trying to avoid both lens flare and lighting the black poster board background too much.
The picture was taken on a coffee table, so nowhere too touristy :)
