Sugar and Smoke

While taking pictures of smoke proved to be a lot of fun, I initially set out to do more with the smoke displayed in my earlier post. As the smoke traveled upward, an object placed above to disturb the path might be interesting. After obtaining a spoon from the kitchen and fixing the handle to a box to elevate it above the smoke, I placed the box next to the plume. As the stream of smoke rose it filled the spoon, spilling around the sides and continuing in it's original direction.

Once I was done taking the pictures, I simply cropped out the box supporting the spoon and rotated the picture 180 degrees. The two samples below are actually viewed upside-down.

The result from the first example above turned out well, so I thought I'd mix things up a little and try a setup where I wouldn't need to turn the picture upside down. Over the weekend I used a similar setup from the shoot above and while sitting beside the box supporting the spoon, I poured sugar over the cereal with one hand, and fired the remote shutter release with the other.

It was difficult to aim the sugar over the spoon in the dark, so it took a few tries to get some good ones. I'll probably redo these in a couple weeks and change the lighting setup so the cereal is brighter. Until then, here's what I came up with below.