Day 76 of 365

I was going to be all creative and do something St. Patrick's Day inspired and got home from work and didn't very creative. So today I did some smoke work but in honor of St. Patrick's Day used a green piece of fabric over my flash to give it a greenish hue. You can get kind of carried away with these...I took almost 150 shots tonight and could have kept going.

I did play a bit with this technique tonight. Here is the website with the tutorial I used to get started. Because I'm low tech I had to improvise the technique some. Instead of a fast shutter speed I use a relatively slow one. This shot was at .5 seconds and f/8. Because I'm hand holding the flash I need to be able to pull the trigger on the flash while the shutter is still open and half a second gives me that time. The first couple of times I tried this technique I thought I'd be a sharpshooter and be able to press the flash button and shutter button at the same time giving me a good exposure...yeah not so easy. One more thing...this is 3 sticks of incense of varying length which was good and bad. Cool designs but lots of smoke.

I also wondered what it would be like to do an even longer exposure and popping the flash twice during the exposure. The shutter was open for 3.2 seconds at f/8 and I popped the flash right at the beginning and right near the end of the 3.2 seconds. Most shots were really smoky but I also had 3 sticks of incense going so would be considerably less with 1 stick. I think there is potential there for something pretty cool. Check out the double tube on the bottom left.