Five creative ways to use smoke bombs in your photo and video shoots

Smoke bombs are an ever-popular addition to photo and video shoots. Whether you’re trying to create something spooky and creepy or simply trying to make a boring environment a little more interesting they can add a lot of visual impact into your shots.

In this video, Pye Jirsa at SLR Lounge shows us five creative ways we can use smoke bombs in our sessions. But as well as just the creative side of things, Pye also talks about the safety considerations and how we can use them to keep ourselves, our subjects and our environments injury-free.

The list looks quite rudimentary when you see it just written out, but when you watch the video and see the examples, the difference that adding a bit of smoke can make to the scene before the camera becomes quite apparent and very effective.

1. Use it against neutral walls
2. Accentuate accent colours
3. Add motion to your photos
4. Cover boring backgrounds
5. Add flash

Ultimately, all of the suggestions shown in the video are to help make the environment look less boring. To take away some of those plain walls, skies and backgrounds and replace them with some texture. Or to complement and frame the main subject in the picture. Or perhaps to completely cover up a boring (or perhaps too busy) background.

You can check out some more of Pye’s tips to go along with each of the items on the list over on SLR Lounge. Well worth a read if you’re in a creative rut or if you just fancied playing around with smoke bombs on set.

Do you use smoke bombs in your photography or video projects? What’s your favourite technique?

[via SLR Lounge]