Here's a picture of the set up I made. The strobe back lit the cup and smoke, and they were at the lowest power so that they wouldn't over expose everything. I even shot at f/6.8 to darken them down a bit, they were really close to the cup, so there was little light lost due to the inverse square law. As light disperses, it losses intensity over a given area. The closer the light, the brighter it appears.
After I got the camera set up and the focus set, I started playing around with the smoke. At first, I shot at 1/200s to get rid of any ambient light around. The results with the smoke are pretty cool, but I felt like something was missing.
When you light the smoke bombs, it sparks like crazy for a few seconds, then starts the show. I wanted to try to get the sparks caught, and then maybe composite them back into some smoke shots. I was on my last bomb, which luckily had the longest fuse, and so the most sparks. I slowed by shutter down to 1/20s, which in theory should give some cool little light trails. The fuse was lit, and I hurried to start popping exposures.
I got really lucky, and there was one exposure with sparks and smoke in it!
The editing I did in Lr was mostly related to contrast corrections. I added a little bit of clarity to give more definition in the smoke. However, that crushed the blacks too much, so I went into the tone curve and brightened the dark shadows a bit. I also raised the highlights up, as they were a little flat in the smoke.
I also added an adjustment brush around the base of the cup to darken the wood. It was a bit too bright, and it was taking away from the rest of the scene.
See you tomorrow!
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