What a week it has been.! I've been struggling at work with a project that involves many departments, people and pieces of equipment. We've had more than a couple failures that have required a lot of document revisions. Late yesterday we were able to push through and get two documents approved and in use. In addition, I sold 7 prints! I was tired. It was a good way to end the week.
A couple weeks ago, I took a week long vacation. We left home and just got out of our environment. It was a nice break from the routine. I decided to start a photo project during this time off. I had an idea for smoke images. I fooled around with this a while back after seeing some images on Flickr. Most of my previous edits had been in color and I wanted to work solely in black and white this time.
Shooting
Basically I shot with a couple of flashes against a black background. (To get the white background, the image is inverted.) To reduce noise in the background, I tried to keep as much light off the background as possible. I used some matboard taped to the flashes to control direction of light. I shot in manual using my cameras highest sync speed to reduce ambient light and aperture to conrol light from the flashes on the smoke. Flashes were triggered with radio syncs. The camera was on a tripod and I used a cable release. I shot out in my garage in the evening. I had a small light to provide a little ambient light so I wasn't stumbling around and a small flashlight to watch the smoke - it helped to anticipate when something interesting was about to happen.
Editing
The workflow was important in getting a consistent look across all images. The process of shooting and editing these images took a while to figure out. The thing that was interesting to me is how the editing process evolved several times in a short period. This was the first time I really used Lightroom to make some initial edits before bringing into Photoshop to perform the bulk of the editing process. All images were editing individually in Photoshop. I saved time in Photoshop by creating some actions to set up each image with all of the layers needed. After processing about half the images, I made a couple changes to the editing process. I went back and re-processed the first half. After finishing up all the images and making some initial prints, I went back and re-processed all images again to clean up some background noise issues.
Figure 1 below show a screen grab of one of the Levels layers which was used to whiten the whites and in some cases, blow out the whites. You can see how I've adjusted the levels to blow out background.
Figure 1
In Figure 2, I've added another Levels layer to help identifiy noise in the background. You can see how far over I've pulled the black tab and the resultant background noise. I cleaned up the noise the then hid or deleted the Levels 2 layer - It was really only meant to help with the editing proces.
Figure 2
Printing
I made a couple individual 10x15 prints from Photoshop, but my version of Photoshop doesn't automate print packages. I wanted to try and utilize the benefits on my printers roll paper and set up a couple of custom print packages in Lightroom. Luckily, Lightroom can use my custom B&W printer profile. One thing I don't care for in Lightroom print packages, is all the images in the set are the same. No way to print out differnt images in one print package. (There is a program called Qimage that is supposed to be really good for printing packages, but I've never tried it.)
Finishing
We have a Logan mat cutter. One thing I learned when production mat cutting is to make multiple cuts on the same stop. For example, when cutting 8x10 mats, make all the 10" cuts on your mats and your backing materials so the 10" sides on all materials are the same. Then adjust stop to 8" and then make all your 8" cuts on mats and backing materials. When you stack your mat against your backing, the outter dimensions should be very close. Before I figured this out, the dimensions of my mats and backing were just different enough to be annoying and I tossed many mats because it looked sloppy.
I matted these prints with a black core white mat. That black core really makes the images pop off. Not to brag or anything, but I think these images look great! This was a fun project.
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