I have started to look at other things to photograph after tinkering with the water droplets I tried last week. Over the weekend, I decided to try my hand at smoke trails. We picked up some incense sticks, as they leave a good trail of smoke, making it a good option to photograph. I took some time this evening to take a crack at it.
I setup a small table, a stand to hold the black cloth for the backdrop and a single off camera hot shoe flash and proceeded to do some test shots. The big problem I had at first was focus, with the smoke moving around and me shooting with a macro lens, I was not getting a sharp image. I decided to focus on the incense stick, close down to a smaller aperture and turn up the flash power, which was still only at 1/16 power due to it being so close to the subject and zoomed in to 50mm. Below are some results of my first shot at it.
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