First thing I did was drill some holes in a scrap piece of 2x4 at varying depths to hold some match sticks. Then I started shooting a single match. I went through a bunch of matches trying to find out how to get them to smoke the most... unfortunately the results were highly unpredictable (I was using a box of really old kitchen matches... the box was probably at least 5 years old, and maybe that was part of the problem...) But for that box of matches, blowing them out while the "tip" was still burning (before it got to the wood) usually resulted in the most smoke.
Anyway... moved up to two matches, and then three. Then I got the idea to try and color the smoke. I tried lighting the smoke with gels, but because of the close proximity of the matches to each other, had no luck. I then cut little strips of red, green and blue gel, taped them together and placed this home-made "tri-color filter" in front of the lens. This colored the smoke, but also the match sticks (which I figured I could fix in post). But where the edges of the gels overlapped was a visible seam -- and trying to clone it out without being obvious proved difficult (because of the intricate, non-repetitive details of the smoke)...
So... I decided to do some selective re-saturation (the opposite of selective de-saturation?)... took one of the shots of plain white smoke, and used three masked adjustment layers (one each for red, green and blue) in "Overlay" mode at 33% opacity and arrived at my originally-envisioned effect much more easily!
Shot with the Canon 100mm/2.8 Macro with a flash to camera-right.
(07159)
Statistics
Place: 2 out of 99 Avg (all users): 7.3805 Avg (commenters): 8.1290 Avg (participants): 7.1250 Avg (non-participants): 7.4965 Views since voting: 14007 Views during voting: 462 Votes: 205 Comments: 56 Favorites: 66 (view)
You told; so we know! But what good is a photo which gets all its masterful effects from Gimp / Photoshop? Nothing personal, just trying to point out the lax in DPChallenge rules ;o(
However, I honestly appreciate all the experimental work you've done to achieve the effect ;o)
I have to say that terje changed his comment three times during this challenge... his first comment was simply:
EddyG?
Then, a few days later, he changed it to something like:
EddyG or Kiwiness for sure! Good luck!
and then a few days after that, he changed it to the "final" version you see below. I thought the whole sequence was pretty funny. I didn't show this picture to anybody else or tell anyone which entry was mine, so to Terje I say: "good guess!" (and congrats on your ribbon!)
Congrats on the ribbon here, very well deserved ...
But thanks heaps for the "how did they do this?" commentry, and that is really useful :) Really well described, especially that rather than just listing what worked, you took us through the steps of what didn't.
Congrats Eddy. I was wondering the whole time how you did that. I really thought you had created this effect on the fly. One way of creating more smoke is by putting a bit of oil on the match head before lighting it, it works well!
Congrats on the ribbon! Great description on how you did it. This is one of the shots where i was like, "how the heck?!". Masked layers huh? wow...very cool.
Congratulations, Eddy! This shot and Kiwi's might as well have had your signatures on them. I didn't get a chance to vote, but I had this pegged for the blue. Fabulous!
Very nice effect. On my monitor all the colours are seperate and I thought you used perspectice to get lights on the smoke. I downloaded it and lightened it somewhat (to see what others see) am even more intrigued to learn how you did it?
Wow! :-) Creative idea, amazing implemetation! I am very curious about the description of this photo! The smoke is wonderful clear, composition with the increasing matches is great. But my favourite thing here is the shades of RGB colours! 10! 10! 10!
I love this one! Def. one of my favs out of this challenge. It looks awesome, although, the light on the right hand match is a little bright, which tends to draw my eye to that instead of to the smoke
veri interesting composition and tack sharp. great colors in the smoke. I'll be interested in seeing how this was created since it looks to me like the smoke is not coming from the matches.
Like the idea - and the definition in the smoke, a difficult capture well achieved. The actual patterning of the smoke itself is a touch chaotic, I think i'd have found a simpler composition more appealling.
RGB Smoke
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
