Fun With Kids, Cameras, and Smoke Monsters

Hellz yeah, once again it is time to nerd out, and prepare for a bevy of half baked time travel theories that always coincide with a new season of Lost.  I was stoked to see one of the extremely few TV shows I care about back on, even more so since it was a great season premier.  To celebrate, me and the kids decided to have a little fun making our own smoke monsters.

The set up is pretty simple, here's what you need to do it yourself;

1- Any camera with a hot shoe, macro setting, and tripod.
2- A remote flash (wired or wireless)
3- A dark surface for backdrop
4- Incense

We just set up the camera facing the back of our couch, pointed the flash at the smoke from the side so it wouldn't hit the backdrop, focused in on the smoke, and fired away.  I took the shots while the kids (Calvin and Noah for future reference) waved stuff in the smoke to create turbulence.

I won't bore you, my imaginary readers, with the pics we got.  Have you ever seen smoke?  Yeah, they look like that.  The fun part was taking them into Photoshop, and having the kids tell me what they wanted to do to the smoke to turn it into their very own smoke monsters.  The following pics were manipulated with simple hue/saturation adjustments, mirroring, and some warping.  What they came up with cements in mind both their genius, and their obvious need for future therapy.

 

Personally I see some creepy stuff in there, but then I always flunked those Rorschach tests.  If you want to give it a try, it's a quick and easy project that's fun for all the pyros in the family.  Drop a message in the comments section if you'd like to see a more detailed tutorial on this.

Before putting the gear away today, I decided to do some practice for my upcoming skate and snowboard series that will involve some sequence shots.  We had lost the light, so it's a pretty grainy shot, but I'll leave you with little Calvin in a shot I call Batman's Humble Beginnings.

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