« Shoot the Band, Part II: The Poor Man's Fog Machine. »

Not too long ago, I was drinking heartily with some of my favorite people in the world, a misfit ragtag band of spirit-crumplers that we call the Supper Club. One of our party (he shall remain nameless), in his drunken expounding, coined a new word: Frunds. It's simple word creation through addition: Friends + Fun = FRUNDS. Sometime later, his own girlfriend added a prefix, when refering to the few of us that happen to be obsessed with picture-taking: PhotograFrunds. Or maybe it's Photographrunds?

All that preface is just so I can now use that term freely. Onward, to the meat.

Over New Year's Eve, one of my photografrunds, McNair Evans, gave me a most excellent photogragift: Four Cherry-Bomb Brand, 'Everlasting Mammoth Smoke' Bombs. Yes, it says that on them. He grew up just north of the border to South Carolina, and if you've ever driven south thru the Carolinas on I-95, you know what pleasures await you just South of the Border...Namely bigger and better fireworks than you can get in NC. These fat cigars do what they say, two minutes of white smoke spewing forth in a sulfuric eruption of light-diffusing awesomeness.

He told me that he often uses them to create some atmosphere in a shot, or to diffuse the harsh direct light of the sun. Of course, Hollywood uses fog machines to do the same. Less sulfur-smelling, longer lasting, and in some cases maybe more predictable (it's smoke after all), a fog machine can really up the ante on a shoot if you want some of that atmospheric effect. Of course, it also requires power to operate and takes some time to warm up, and you have to have plenty of fog fluid on hand if you need a lot of smoke, so the smoke bomb trumps the fog machine in terms of portability, spur-of-the-moment usefulness, and of course price, at least on a one-time use basis. Plus you have to LIGHT IT ON FIRE, and we all know that's a bonus.

So back to the band shoot. After we finished with our indoor studio-ish group shots, we went outside to get some of those fairly typical band photos, you know, the Band Standing in the Forest. If it isn't already cliché, it will be soon, like the ubiquitous Band on Railroad Tracks or Band in Front of Brick Wall shots. Photografrund Krista and I were hoping to at least make the shot a very awesome one, maybe a little different than the run-of-the-mill, and we turned to the Everlasting Mammoth Smoke Bombs to help us. The fact that this band consists of stylish, good-looking people certainly didn't hurt either.

Here's an example of what the scene looked like without the smoke. We positioned the band between us and the sun, and set up a speedlight strobe in a large shoot-thru umbrella camera left. Not terrible, very contrasty too be sure, but it would work. Krista was holding the light stand down in case of wind, but luckily we had Thomas, friend of the band, standing by to operate the Poor Man's Fog Machine Unit. There was very little wind, but what little there was seemed to be coming from camera right, so we had him walk into the woods a little ways and light 'er up. The smoke came billowing forth, and let me tell you, there's no herding smoke. It would alternate between evenly coating the background (good), to completely enveloping the band and myself (bad), to simply rising above us and doing very little. I shot rapidly during the two 2-minute spells (we fired up 2 of them) and tried to at least nail a couple angles if possible. When the smoke was behind them, the effect was sublime: streaks of columnated light thru the colloidal smoke, spooky and atmospheric, and separating the band from the busy background of trees and limbs. When the smoke moved forward and came over them or between us, it would simply reflect the strobe-light back at me, and completely obscure the band. I also tried to milk the sun flare a few times, to interesting effect, if not exactly useable for the band.

Just about right, but maybe a little 'warzone' looking...

Now that's way too much.

MMMM, now we're talking. Compare that to the non-smoked picture up above.

I love this shot, but it's pretty useless as a BAND photo.

At this point, the smoke has just about cleared out, but is still giving me a little diffusion and some flare artifacts at the bottom right.

After burning down two of these fatties...I'm still talking about smoke bombs, people, don't gimme that look...we had all had enough sulfur for the day. Krista and I both loved how the photographs turned out with the smoke, so we chalked up another deposit in the bank of variety and moved on to shoot some individual portraits inside again...which I'll cover in the next post.

Thanks for visiting the new version of DoubleLGPhotos.com, I'll still tweaking the new layout, constrained by the original 365 photo width of 900 pixels...couldn't fathom going back thru all those posts and resizing all the pictures for a narrower column. Sound out in the comments if you have trouble viewing or reading the content, I realise this is really WIDE site by most web standards, and it has me concerned. Let me know what you think, and thanks in advance.

-llg

Comments

[Zach Stamey]

GREAT work Leon! Always thinking outside the box for sure. This is really great inspiration. I'm filming a music video this weekend and I may just have to try this out for some slo-mo shots.

I'll let you know if I use your idea!

[g]

"FIRE! FIRE!"