Welcome ! Care to join me for some smoke?

Hello  and welcome to my very first post on this blog ! I am super excited to have finally got this up and running. Be forewarned, I love to ramble. Some times. Be also forewarned, so far, I have one cute little ever willing model for my photographic adventures and you will see a lot of her on this blog. I'm hoping to get a few more models soon ! Two things I've been wanting to photograph for over a year now. The first one - droplet photography and the other smoke photography. While I still have to try my hand at the first, I did try the latter. Some 150 odd actuations later, I was thrilled to get a handful of keepers. Here's a sneak peak into the first one - 

As you will notice over the course of the images I upload, I love photographing in natural light (which is why I had a hard time taking pictures of smoke in a dark room !!) I also don't have the resources to buy expensive camera gear / props so I improvise and make do with common household objects for props. Sometimes, I call upon a friend to borrow a prop. In this case, a shoutout to my friend Vinny for this neat teapot and for the awesome black backdrop. Incase you were wondering, the backdrop is a black sheet. 

Amongst other firsts, this was also the first time I ventured into shooting complete manual mode instead of the usual aperture and shutter priority. I loved the freedom of being able to adjust shutter speed and aperture for a change instead of only one or the other. Plus I think  I got a pretty sharp picture - you can actually count the number of windows in the room by looking on the right side of the teapot ! What do you think? Now that I've taken the plunge, I've realized, its not as hard as I'd thought and I do love it !  I might just stick with it.

Incase you were wondering what actuations are, I recently learnt that myself. Watch out for my next post to learn about them !