Life’s but a shifting shadow, a lone incense
That sizzles and consumes its hour upon the stand
And then burns no more; it is a photograph
Taken by an idiot, full of light and smoke,
Signifying nothing.


Below details how this photograph (and the banners for this blog) was done. Other than cropping and resizing, no other digital post-processing was performed. This was a 100% photographic effort…i.e., you can also use a film camera for this.

Equipment: Minolta A1, 5600HS(D) flash, tripod, remote cable.

There are only three elements in the image: background, smoke and incense. Although the image was taken in one shot, each element was independently (well mostly) illuminated and controlled:

  1. Background. The image was taken in my bedroom, with overhead lights and TV blasting. There was also a dark window curtain about 2~3m behind the setup. Normally it takes 1~2s shutter speed on f/11 to get good exposure in this condition. I only had to turn the shutter speed down to 1/4s to completely eliminate the ambient light and make everything black.
  2. Smoke. This was illuminated from the back by the 5600HS(D) flash in wireless mode, pointing up from below towards where the smoke might be. Care was taken to make sure the flash light was illuminating the smoke (so the smoke particles can scatter the flash light into the camera, if you want to know why), and not shining directly into the camera lens. The flash was on manual, with the power level down to about 1/8 or 1/16. The 1/4s shutter speed also helped to get the silk-like texture of the smoke.
  3. Incense. A small 40W reading lamp was placed in the lower front, point towards it. At shutter speed of 1/4s, this was just enough to illuminate it nicely.

The Minolta A1 was on macro mode at the maximum telephoto focal length of 200mm (35mm film equivalent), fixed on the tripod at about 50 cm in front of the incense and smoke. At this setting, the depth-of-field (DOF) was only about 1~1.5 cm, so it was very important to have the smoke flowing in the right direction (in this case to the side) or risk lots of out-of-focus smokes (this is partly the reason for the high f/11 setting. Lower f-stops will shrink the DOF further, making the smoke even harder to focus).

A note about white balance. The blue smoke was the result of setting the white balance to “tungsten” (for the reading lamp). This had the nice effect of illuminating the incense in its correct warm color, but simultaneously shifting the flash-lit smoke to cold blue (this is just like when you take a flash picture in the “tungsten” setting and everything turns blue). Of course, to reproduce this effect on a film camera a tungten-balanced film would be required.