So for this project, I set out to capture the beauty of a lit candle, the mesmerising flame, but when I extinguished the flames I immediately saw the potential that the resulting smoke had to further enhance my image. The result is below and I will explain how I did it, using several images a little PhotoShop magic and some Lightroom post processing too!

Adding smoke to the flame

I'll explain my set up first, it is quite simple. As you can see below, the images were taken in the daytime, I had my trusty black cloth, draped over a table and with a high back dining chair behind to allow me to have a backdrop of the black cloth rising up out of the shot.

Taking my four candles, I arranged them to give what I thought would be the best framing, I chose an arc to avoid the image feeling too regimented or flat, these candles also had writing on them which I needed to make sure would be captured (Or at least not arranged so they were unintentionally cut off), and thats about it

How I did it

My first shots were ok but the 'Celebrate' candle was a bit distracting, the glass and colouring/coating meant that the writing was looking ghosted and the flame was creating a bright spot on the back of the glass. So in my next shot I rearranged to try and reduce the draw that this was causing when looking at the image, I still wonder if I should have removed that one completely.

Arranging the candles

Taken at f22 and ISO64, I was using my 24-70 f/2.8 lens on a 4 second exposure.

I like the shot but it felt like it needed something more and while pondering that I blew out the candles only to be inspired by the resulting smoke that then erupted from the candle wicks.

A touch of smoke

I really loved the effect this gave, to capture the smoke, I set up a speedlight to the left of the shot firing through the smoke. I added my 'Rogue' flashbender so that I could direct the flash to only highlight the smoke and not the backdrop. This shot was taken at 1/200sec at f4.5 ISO64

So now I feel i have the elements that I needed to make the shot that I really wanted but clearly capturing the smoke and the flame in one shot was never going to happen, so into PhotoShop I went, watching a few online videos for how to achieve the effect that I wanted, I took both shots in as separate layers and used the 'Difference' blend mode and then from the smoke layer (As my top layer), masked out everything apart from the smoke. I found that I had to slightly reposition the smoke layer to get the best effect but I was really pleased with how it was starting to look.

A touch of smoke

The smoke now on the flames looked great but it still felt like there was more that I could do to improve the shot, so back to Lightroom and my trusty brush filter, I brushed in some colour to the smoke, using a colour matching the candle pots to show which candle the smoke swirl originated from.

I have to say, I was really pleased with the result and while I might have done things slightly differently looking back, I feel i learnt a lot along the way and enjoyed creating what I think is a really interesting image.