A few months back I was out in California to celebrate Christmas with my extended family. One day during our trip, we thought “Hey, let’s take that picture we’ve been meaning to take for months!” You know, the one where you take your six month old baby, put him in a pot on the stove, and add some vegetables? You’ve all done that photo with your kids, right?

Okay, so maybe my wife and I are just a little crazy. On Halloween we took a series of photos of him buried in a bowl of candy. He’ll surely be scarred for life for the awful things we’re doing to him now as a child. But it’s fun, so what’s a little emotional damage to our pride and joy.

But I digress. So we wanted to take this picture, but left all our gear at home except for the camera, a lens, and the 430EX flash. We had no PC cords and no Pocket Wizards with us to fire the flash off the camera. Now I know I haven’t said this yet on this blog, but having the flash on the camera is bad. Sure, it’s fine for snapshots and getting the quick shot. But if you want to take good photos, you have to get that flash off the camera. See Strobist if you want more on that. So we had to improvise a little to get the shot.

In the first part of this tutorial on smoke photographs, I taught you how to take the actual photographs. Hopefully you’ve gone out and had some fun capturing some easy and beautiful smoke images. Now I’ll show you how to take those images to the next level and really make them pop. Let’s get to it.

The first tutorial to be featured on the Sublime Light is on how to photograph smoke photographs. Photos of smoke are amazingly beautiful, extremely easy to take, and can really take on some interesting shapes. Everyone who looks at a smoke picture sees something different, which is one of the best parts. Where one person will see an angel, another will see a demon. This is a great way to get creative with photography without a lot of equipment commitment.

I’ll show you step by step how to photograph smoke, then how to process the pictures using Photoshop to really make them stand out. So enough already, let’s get started!