Since I’ve been busy with the smoke machine I’ve amassed quite a lot of photos of smoke. I wondered what I could do with the images, and these are two photomanips I came up with in a moment of boredom.

This is Martinique of the band Sticky Antlers. Working with Martinique was pretty frikkin amazing. She knew what to do, how to pose, how to sit still when I needed it. Apparently growing up in a house of artists lends itself to posing. Thanks for your time Martinique. Hope you like the photos.

The obligatory smoke photos. They’re not as easy as you might think, especially without a light absorbent backdrop. I guess I’ve been trying out all the clichéd shots the last while, so my apologies, but they have been teaching me a lot about photography.

I found that it’s quite important to have the light exactly from the side for these, if it’s slightly from the front the smoke is less clear, and if it’s from the back the lens is flooded with light. It also works best if you have a narrow beam of light.

Man, getting a smoke machine to play along while trying to operate a camera on a timer is no child’s play. Well, this is what I got for now. I’ll try some more when I have some willing victims to sit in the smoke.

For the first time ever I tried some reversed lens macro photography.

The image above was taken with my Canon 50mm EF 1:1.4. Those of you familiar with the lens should know that it usually has a minimal focal length of about 0.45m. This image was taken at about 4cm from the object (an antique desk-top lighter), and the field of view is very narrow as the reversed lens introduces quite a bit of magnification.

There are some caveats, there’s no focussing, so you have to move the camera to focus, and there’s no aperture control as all the electronics are now on the wrong side of the lens. There are special mounts that will allow the electronics to function, but their cost is high.

I don’t have any mount, never mind a fancy one that connects the lens electronics, so I was literally holding the lens on to the camera with my one hand, and operating the camera with the other. Gung-ho I tell you!

Update: I’ve added another image, this time of a little baby cactus I have.

So, it seems, at least for now, that I’m the keeper of this cool work of art by the award winning fine artist Retha Ferguson. It’s about 150cm wide, 80 cm high, on a stand that makes the total work about 1.8m high. Right now it’s serving time as a room divider until its creator comes and saves it from such a dreary fate.

The work is made of wood, perspex, rope and… well… black stuff, and is translucent, so I decided to photograph it with a back light. After lots of experimentation with various light modifiers, I decided a shoot-through white umbrella gave the best looking shadows for the strings in the top image.

Here is a full view of the work.

The graffiti in the image above can be found on a side walk of Vilakazi street in Soweto, near the Hector Pieterson museum. The piece above is unfinished. The graffiti shown in the image below, which was on the same wall, shows a complete version of the graffiti. I have since been informed by Mpumelelo that this was part of a campaign by the guys from the Thesis Concept Store. Check it out.

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.” – Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor.

This is my first ever attempt at a self-portrait using studio lights. I’m quite happy with the results. Next shot I do I’ll try not to have the umbrella reflected in my glasses.

The solution is deceptively simple. Actually, there are a number of solutions that I’ve found on various forums on teh interwebs, but the one most people seem to use …is to raise the lights quite high. This will mess with shadows on the face though, so I’ll probably need to put a reflector on a table in front of the subject to bounce light upwards. (I think…)

Another solution that’s a bit expensive, yet totally awesome due to its geeky nature, is to get some polarised gels to put in front of the lights. You then shoot with a polariser on the lens, and voilà, the reflections vanish. Problem is that you apparently lose about 2 stops of light when you do this.

I’m curently busy with a T-Shirt design for ISPA‘s Antispam Working Group, and this is the current draft. I thought I’d put it out here so long. (I just couldn’t wait!) Maybe I’ll get a few smiles.

It’s pretty rad to know that there are these sorts of superheroes out there doing their bit to fight the spamtards from sending spam all over the friggin globe. I wish they had lasers and nukes, though.