Alive and clicking..: February 2010

Ever seen smoke rising.. We have studied that air is all around us. We can feel it, but we can't see it. And air moves in different mysterious ways of its own. From a gentle gust of breeze to the most powerul of tornadoes. Causing that little thuds of turbulence in an aircraft to the drag caused by a passing vehicle, air moves with different speeds and power. But, we can't see the movment, unless that is we have some thing visible floating in the air, like smoke or mist.
And to see smokerising, the little twirls of turbulence, or the smooth rising of non turbulent air, is a beatiful sight in itself. The difficulty in photographing smoke is that, one needs to have special arrangements to photograph it, like a pitch black room without visual disturbance, a black background to avoid lights bouning out, an eternal flash to illuminate just the smoke. In short, it requires a proper studio :)
Since I dont have a studio, I tried and improvised. Thanks to my brother in law, I have an external flash ( a very old National PE 205). However, I dont have anything to fire the external flash, so have to fire it manually using a small red button on it.
So, I set up my tripod, lit an incense stick, turned off the lights and sat midway between the camera and the incense with flash in one hand and the remote control in the other. and got the following shot.