You know what they say: Where there’s smoke, there are people capturing of smoke. And for this week’s Shooting Challenge , we need to determine beautiful, billowing smoke.

The Challenge

Take a photo that features the ins and outs of smoke as its subject. You could contextualize the smoke (in other words, it may be component to a scene other than featured in front of a white or black backdrop), but the smoke itself should be both prominent and very detailed.

The Method

You’re gonna want a bigger light.

Photocritic has a must-read tutorial with tips from photographer Graham Jefferey, who runs Sensitive Light . Here’s how you can overcome the challenges of the medium in a nutshell:

With the smaller aperture needed to capture the plumes of smoke properly, you obviously lose rather a lot of light. It is a problem, because that will freeze the motion of the constantly-moving smoke, you will have quite a fast shutter time. In practical terms, this suggests 1/250 or faster. Simultaneously, that you could’t reduce the ISO value for your camera either, because the puerile plumes of smokes could be ruined by significant amounts of noise. Obviously, a coinciding need of low ISO, small apertures and high apertures implies that you will need an infinite amount of light.

Softboxes and flashes are excellent solutions to the lighting problem. But while you don’t have pro equipment like that around the house, another must-read tutorial from flickr user hawkjh recommends the usage of any directional light source-like a projector.

But as I said, read both of those tutorials, and this challenge won’t seem intimidating at all. The lead photo by flickr member aubergene , while wonderful, isn’t outside anyone’s technical reach.

The Rules – READ THESE

1. Submissions should be your individual.
2. Photos have to be taken AFTER the challenge was announced.
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings, technique and story behind shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com, not me.
5. Include 800px wide image (200KB or less) AND a 2560×1600 sized in email. (The 800px image is the single judged, so be happy to crop/alter the larger image for wallpaper-sized dimensions.)
6. One submission per person.
7. Use the best SUBJECT line to your email (more info on that below)

Send your best photo by Monday, October 11th at 8AM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with ” Smoke” inside the subject line. Save your files as JPGs, and use a FirstnameLastnameSmoke.jpg (800px wide) and FirstnameLastnameSmokeWallpaper.jpg (2560px wide) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) inside the body of the email in conjunction with a story of the shot in a number of sentences. And don’t skip this story part because it’s often essentially the most enjoyable part for us all beyond the shot itself!

If you’re keen on Shooting Challenges, you may additionally like my new day-in-the-life site: Life, Panoramic. Or in spite of this, you could not. We don’t guarantee satisfaction like some motorized weight infomercial. Besides, they still just hit you up for the shipping anyway. We don’t even charge shipping…yet…

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This post is tagged: billowing smoke, light source, lighting problem, photographer, shutter time