Smoke is elusive, its mysterious, and I always seem to be drawn too it. Although I don’t condone smoking, I find there’s always something evocative about those old photos of people smoking.



I decided to use this and create my own smoky pictures, ones which I will sure to do again. The inspiration for this series is a photo from William Klein, a man sat against a rock smoking. That was the element I wanted to capture, that utter relaxation-exuding class. As I said, I don’t condone smoking, so for this we used a vape pen (which I found gives a lot stronger smoky effect, and has some great flavours, even ones without nicotine).  

            
We went out to the front of my house and sat on some pile of leaves and twigs from the gardening, which we hadn’t cleared up yet (lazy, I know), but it made for a nice buffer, so you couldn’t see the pebbles from the driveway.

When I was looking back over the pictures I felt that there was too much going on and it needed to be clamed down, so I edited them into black and white, and upped the contrast, to make the blacks stand out more and the lights lighter, because the first time I edited them I wasn’t happy. After I looked over them the next day (which I highly recommend, it gives the brain a break and you can look at it with fresh eyes) I felt that the colours weren’t strong enough.

(A little titbit of a story, in the picture where he’s looking over smiling, mum came out and started talking to us, so he was being really nice and polite!)