To present my image I had it printed 12×18 the closest to an A3 sized photograph without cropping any of my image. I mounted it on A2 White Mount-board, I chose white because my image is quite dark and I think it’s a nice contrast with the border.

After looking at the images from Maleficent I decided that it would give the photograph an eerie atmosphere if I were to have some smoke lingering in the background. I thought a couple of clouds of smoke would also add to the theme of fairytales as it adds a fantasy feel. It could also act as dust in the air and as this set is supposed to be a 100 years old and abandoned I thought the smoke could help to reinforce this feeling as well.

I first bought some smoke pellets online which are small white cylinders that you carefully light and they produced 30-40 seconds of smoke. Although I managed to capture some smoke in my first test shoot, I really wasn’t happy with the smoke pellets. They took a while to light and when they were lit you couldn’t control where the smoke was going, partly because of the wind and the amount of smoke produced. I found that by the time I had lit the pellet and moved back to the camera to take the image the smoke had almost ran out. Another thing that I didn’t like about the smoke pellets would be amount of smoke it produced. It wasn’t enough for me to be able to cover the background or the entire bed.

I thought about how else I could create this smoke effect, perhaps in photoshop. Despite this, after watching a documentary with Gregory Crewdson, I saw his crew using a smoke machine on the back of a car which they drove around filling the scene with fog. This is when I decided to hire a smoke machine for the night of my shoot and experiment with it and the atmosphere I could create. When I was using the smoke, I found that it was really difficult judging the amount of smoke needed until it became overwhelming in the image. With the lights I used, especially the soft-box, the smoke was exaggerated and sometimes too bright for the image which made finding the correct exposure quite hard. Another problem I had with the smoke machine was the wind. Because I was shooting my image outside it was impossible to stop the wind interfering with the direction and amount of smoke.

Overall, I’m glad I used the smoke machine as I love the effect it created in my final shoot it adds a sense of mystery and dark tone to the atmosphere and I think relates well to the ‘fairytale’ concept of the piece.