Finding Figures in the Smoke
Updated: 2 hours ago
A few years ago, someone in my camera club showed a photograph of smoke. The wisps and curls suggested something ethereal, and I wanted to learn how to create something similar.
I lit some frankincense in a burner, placed it against a black backdrop, and took aim with my camera. I quickly discovered that if too much smoke accumulates in a room, the smoke alarm goes off. So I moved outdoors.
Unfortunately, even on a calm day, there’s enough air movement to dissipate the smoke before I could capture the effects I wanted. Eventually, I abandoned the experiment.
Last month, I attended a Photographic Society of America (PSA) event in Las Vegas. Among the activities were stations where photographers could experiment with specialty techniques, including “smoke” photography.
This time, however, there was no smoke involved!
Instead, we photographed a plasma tube while deliberately moving the camera. The movement transformed the glowing strands of ionized gas into flowing, ethereal shapes resembling smoke.
As I examined my photographs, I began seeing figures in the swirling patterns: faces, mysterious beings, and creatures that seemed to emerge from another world.
There’s a name for this phenomenon: pareidolia, our tendency to perceive familiar shapes in ambiguous patterns. It’s why we see faces in clouds or animals in rock formations.
I decided to take the process one step further. Using ChatGPT, I added subtle details to some of the images to suggest the figures I saw in my mind’s eye. My goal wasn’t to turn the abstract patterns into realistic illustrations, but to give viewers just enough of a hint to discover something in the images for themselves.
