I had originally planned to visit the Highland Games today, but the rain made that an unappealing prospect. I spent the day working on a series of smoke pictures instead. Sure, the subject is almost a cliche, but the exercise was a lot of fun.
Steve Paxton of Paxton Prints has a nice write up on how to get started. I used his basic setup except for the snoot… instead I used a piece of cardboard as a flag to keep the light from hitting the background.
I started out with my 24-85 on the camera, but eventually moved over to the 70-200 at about 100MM. Shooting tethered is the only way to go when doing something like this. Once the shot is framed and your focus is set, there’s really little else you need to worry with at the camera. Canon’s EOS Utility includes a remote control app that allows you to control everything and even fire the shutter from the computer. The only thing I don’t like about shooting tethered is that the file naming settings in the camera are ignored. Maybe there’s a setting in the Canon software somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet.
The processing on these shots is pretty basic. Noise reduction, overlays, blurs, a little channel mixing to push the color one way or another. To be honest, my workflow is a little out of sync with the new camera thanks to the lack of support for the new RAW format.