Disclaimer: although I did quite a few pictures with cigarettes and smoke, I will not show any pictures here and you won’t find any on my website either. The reason is, I have 83k viewers on fb alone and big percentage of them are teenagers and I wouldn’t want to be the one who put this “smoking is cool” misconception in their heads.
Myself I smoke occasionally, mainly if my model smokes because it brings a conversation on a more intimate level.
If you want to photograph a person with cigarette, here’s my advice:
- Choose a person who smokes. Person who doesn’t will hold a cigarette in a wrong way, too far from the face and with negative body language overall
- During smoking people squint a bit to not let smoke in the eyes. Your model will need to make an effort not to do so
- Smoke is very dynamic and sometimes creates surreal and interesting shape coming out of the mouth, you may consider sports mode to not miss that
- Person needs to really make sure to hold the smoke in to achieve a density that would look cool on the picture
- Smoke against dark background and in dark clothes
- Use contra light to illuminate the smoke to give it further volume and texture similar to what I have done here with dust here.
Good luck ;)
NextUp: Working with projector
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