Smoke Photography – Variations

It has been a couple of months again since my last post with new smoke photography. Here is some new smoke art from a recent shoot..

Shooting smoke with a 21Mpix camera is really wonderful as it will allow full frame pictures to be printed quite large, or on the other hand gives more cropping flexibility while still keeping reasonable resolution.. Have a look at this first picture.. on the left you can see the original smoke trail I captured, with on the right 4 different variations, all made using the top part of the picture, either on its own (1), mirrored (2) or even mirrored twice (3 and 4).  The resulting mirrored pictures are very different from the original, and from each other, ..

The ‘purists’ may only appreciate the smoke that was actually shot, and not any mirrored derivatives.. so only the original and maybe number 1 would be of interest to those..
While I agree that it is ‘harder’ to come up with a beautiful recognisable smoke pattern without layers and mirroring (think Boy and Balloon, the Sorcerer, basically everything in the Smoke gallery), the symmetry of the mirrored smoke can be very appealing and in turn reveal very surprising shapes (Hommage to Magritte, Queen of Hearts, other ones in Smoke and Mirrors gallery)

Here is another new example the purists may appreciate.. personally I see the shape of a woman, holding up her baby.. maybe the smoke leaving the baby could be its spirit leaving it.. that would make it a sad scene, and the woman’s expression and head looking up could indeed point the same way.. But feel free to let your own mind come up with an image..

Finally, a little abstract shape, a detail I liked within a picture..
Feel free to comment with what you see..