6 Stunning Portrait Techniques Using The Handheld SmokeNINJA Pro

(If you want to watch the tutorial go to The Slanted Lens on YouTube!)

Handheld smoke machines like the SmokeNINJA Pro have revolutionized smoke on set. You know, they’re small enough you can get a little steam in a cup of coffee but powerful enough you can haze this entire room and give you great smoke effects when you’re doing a portrait. So let’s take a look at doing a portrait with a handheld smoke machine, why use smoke, how to light smoke and just some great images. Let’s get started and see what we can do. You ready Sasha? Yes! Here we go!

So why use smoke on set? Why would you use smoke for a portrait? For the simple reason that it gives you depth in the background. It gives you a transition area from the foreground to the background. So the SmokeNINJA Pro is a device that allows you to have three different types of smoke. You can use that heavy smoke that gives you that definition between foreground and background. You see it can be part of the image.It can be very strong. Or you can go to a steam. So it’s just a small steam that’s kind of around the person or coming out of a coffee cup. Or you can go to just a kind of dry ice that sits down on top of things, sits on your head, sits in your plate. It used to be we’d have a chill box and something we’d have to create, a whole device, to be able to get smoke to sit on the ground. But with the SmokeNINJA Pro it allows you to have those three different options. But the main reason you do it is to give you depth in the background. It also looks more cinematic.

So many films that you’ve watched have smoke in them or haze in them. The SmokeNINJA Pro has the ability with the fan to create haze which is a beautiful look. You don’t really see the smoke, you just feel the atmosphere. When you go into a club it has atmosphere. When you go outside and it’s rained and the rain is stopped there’s atmosphere. Rarely are we in a situation that there isn’t atmosphere. You don’t see light unless it hits something. The reason you use that smoke is because, with a backlight, you light the smoke. Just the atmosphere, even if it’s just haze, the light lights something and it gives you depth through the entire image.

We photographed on the USS Constitution one time and you see this huge ship and it’s just black. It’s just blackness back there. We put smoke all the way through that and put a backlight and all of a sudden you saw every sail. Everything in that ship just lit up. It was just gorgeous looking. It gave you depth. You saw the entire image. Most DPs on set are using smoke because it gives you depth to the image.

When this handheld technology started it wasn’t technology at all, it was vape machines. You’d be on set and they would put a vape and they would rig it and set it in somebody’s clothes. And it just was super dangerous and not effective. And then when they came up with the first smoke machines like this they were not safe at all. They would melt down and burn up. This SmokeNINJA Pro has solved all those problems. This is a safe device that allows you to use smoke in tight spaces and it’s completely safe around a person. So that’s the reason I love this machine more than anything else I’ve ever used. Because this one has bridged that gap between vaping and a really handheld portrait device. The fluid they use is safe to ingest or get on your skin or your eyes. It’s really perfectly safe, even to ingest.

So let’s talk about how to light smoke. There are very simple basic principles that if you follow you’ll get great smoke shots every single time. The first one is you have to use a backlight. You cannot front light smoke and make it look very good. Here’s an example of the same shot with a front light versus a back light. Look at the difference between those two. The back light defines the smoke. It gives you the separation. It creates the depth. You need to use a backlight. Now don’t overexpose it, don’t make it too bright. Don’t make it so your smoke is blown out, unless that’s your effect. But just keep it under control. But backlight it.

Number two, you need a darker background. If you shoot white smoke on a white background it doesn’t look very good. So you need a darker background. I shoot on dark gray most of the time because I can bring that dark gray up in value or I can push it down to make it pretty dark. So dark gray is a great background to use. But a darker background is going to work. A white seamless that you take those lights off from it, let it go a little darker, it looks great as well. But keep the background darker. Don’t be afraid to put lights in the image. Holding a light, light from behind, all those kinds of things give you interest in the smoke. Especially if you’re using anamorphic lenses. Those lights in the image give you that horizontal flare. They just look absolutely fabulous.

And last of all, haze is almost more useful than smoke because haze just gives you atmosphere in the room. It’s what creates those shaft of lights like you have that stage light on a person. You have the light coming in through the window. You have those really beautiful looking light sources. That comes from haze more than smoke. On the SmokeNINJA Pro you’ve got a fan which allows you to break that smoke up and turn it into haze. We used to send or put a box fan in front of a big smoke machine to break up the smoke to do the same thing. This is a haze device. So it’ll create nice beautiful haze in the room to give you that shaft of light. That’s what gives you the light. And it’s also an angle of incidence issue. You can’t have it looking straight at you. You’ve got to move it around so it’s almost on an 80° to the right or left. That’s what gives you, or from behind, that’s what gives you your shaft of light. So there’s some simple thoughts on how to light smoke. So let’s get to some images. Let’s start lighting some smoke.

1. So here’s our lighting set up for lighting a person with the smoke from behind. I’ve got a grid on a light that’s going to give me a rim light. It’s going to rim her and it’s going to rim the smoke from behind. I’ve got a green light on a strobe head back behind this curtain wall here. And that green’s going to tie into the green of the set. And then I’ve got a hard light on her face. It feels very much like a stage light. So a hard stage light on her face. But I’ve really made it very tight so it falls off quickly on her dress. And that really feels more and more like a stage light when you do that. So this is shooting smoke from behind. So there’s our first setup.

Another thing that’s super important to realize when you’re lighting smoke is to try to shoot with a very shallow depth of field. Because it allows the smoke to fall more out of focus and becomes more atmospheric. And it just gives it a very dreamy kind of soft look in the background. It’s a gorgeous look. So shoot with a shallow depth of field. It helps make everything seem a little more dreamy in the background.A longer lens will help because it allows everything to fall out of focus faster. So sometimes I’m shooting at 35mm close or sometimes I’m shooting at 150mm further away. So they all, both of those, have a different look.(Shot with Tamron 35-150mm Lens.)

The nice thing about the SmokeNINJA Pro is that the solution they’re using does not irritate your eyes, does not irritate your skin. Basically you can ingest it and it’s completely safe. So even though it’s hitting her face and things you can put the smoke right on her and it’s not going to bother her at all. It’s made to be able to be used like this. This technology has been coming on for a long time. But now it’s perfected to the point where you don’t have to worry about the smoke being a problem for people when you shoot around people on set.

2. So this is an example of using the smoke as the background. We don’t have drapes back there. We don’t have anything else. It’s just a gray background with the smoke. So the smoke, as it changes and kind of becomes stronger and weaker gives us a different looking background. Some of these are really interesting. Sometimes the smoke is laying kind of horizontal. Sometimes it’s really kind of billowy and very strong looking. Sometimes it’s very subtle. We are lighting this with a light straight behind her. So it really emphasizes the smoke. All of the smoke between her and the light is really going to, it’s going to glow back there. The light behind her is on low power so it’s not going to make the smoke look too bright. I can kind of see the light underneath her arm occasionally to get that kind of flare. So don’t be afraid to put lights in the image. It looks really interesting with smoke. So that’s a simple setup. We have still that stage type light on her face which just cuts off. We also have a little back light on the camera right side, a head on the camera right side high that gives us a little back light on the smoke. And more importantly it kind of it brings her out of the background and gives her a rim light. It brings her out of the background. So that’s setting up using smoke as the background.

What’s nice about this with a SmokeNINJA Pro is that it has fog, it’s got dry ice and it’s got steam. So we were doing some with dry ice. That dry ice kind of hangs in the air a little longer, a little thicker. So that was interesting. So we’re changing the type of smoke that we’re doing with a click of a button. You can change the smoke and give you a different look which makes it really interesting when you’re shooting portraits on set. It also, it gives me 3 minutes of continuous burst time. I can keep this running for three full minutes which will be really important when we start doing haze in the room. That really helps to fill the room with haze and to make this really useful. It charges immediately. You don’t have to wait for this to get warm and to start to give you smoke. You hit the button and it goes. And that makes it so you can really use it quickly on set. A little smoke up front, a little smoke in the background looks really awesome. So there’s how we set up using smoke as our background.

3. So the way we set this up is rather than turning the light and aiming it towards the camera we turned the light back and aimed it towards the background. So now we put our smoke between the light and the background. And that’s going to give us a really beautifully lit background and create a silhouette. It’s going to keep the light out of the front of the set so it keeps that silhouette. It keeps that in silhouette from breaking up by the light in the front bouncing off from the ceiling and things and gives us a beautiful silhouette. We did a few where she held a light to be able to just light her face. That looks really pretty. But this is a single light, one light on the background. Smoke between the light and the background. That gives you that beautiful silhouette. It’s a lot of times easier to do that because you’re aiming at the background. So you have the advantage of your lighting the background and the smoke and that creates the interest. But this has a very thick heavy smoke that just kind of hangs in the air for a long time which makes it very easy to work with. And it kind of changes a little bit. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful look to be able to play with because it changes. But it hangs in that air for so long.

4. This is one of my favorite ways to shoot and that is with haze in the room. The SmokeNINJA Pro comes with a fan that allows you to run the smoke into it and break it up and to fill the room. And it just gives you a beautiful haze in the room. Which means any light you can put on an angle, a cross angle through it, is going to show up. So we’ve got an optical spot by Westcott in that far corner that gives us a very focused light. That’s going to give us that shaft to light onto her face. It’ll light her face a little bit. But we’ve got a Westcott 400 head into a V-flat that’s going to really open up her face and allows us to have control on how much light we have bouncing back. But it’s supposed to look like a bounce light back into her face, those kinds of stage lights.

The nice thing about this is you can put this on a 1/4 20 or on a magnet and that magnet will just hook to any metal stand. Or you put on a 1/4 20 that’ll work on any kind of a plate or stand that you use on set. And that allows you to set this up to run the haze, and just keep running it periodically throughout the day. We filled up 700 square feet without any problem. We could probably do twice that without any problem. So it really is a pretty robust device as far as being powerful enough to fill a large room to give you haze. So here’s some of those images. They look fabulous.

So the fan has its own internal lithium ion batteries. So you charge it with a USB-C Port which makes that nice, you can charge it. It has three different speeds so you can go from small, up to much harder if you want to really break the smoke up. So one, two and three gives you three different speeds.

So there really is no residue. It’s clean. It doesn’t smell like anything. I mean it’s the ideal smoke to be able to use on set. And it’s not going to hurt your eyes. It’s not going to, if you swallow it it’s not going to hurt you. So it’s ideal for being on set.

5. So with the SmokeNINJA Pro you got a little bubble device you can put on the end of the fan with a little tube here. Put that into the heavy bubble device and turn it on and the bubbles just start coming out. It’s fabulous and they kind of float onto Sasha here. And when they would hit they just give a little puff. It almost looks like snow coming down. We shot a bunch of these. This again was lit with a beauty dish up front on her face. Beauty dish on her face and rim light on the bubbles. And light on the background so we get nice definition in the smoke from behind. But I put blue on the two lights in the background just because it’s snowy kind of feeling to just make it feel a little bit cooler. I thought that looked really cool, cool, yeah cooler and cool. So and that was the way we set this up. Three lights again and doing those little bubbles. So take a look at some of these images using the bubbles. It’s a lot of fun.
6. So this has a steam function and that steam function is a very soft kind of textured smoke. It is great for cups of coffee or product shots. It just has a really great texture for that. It is edible so you can spray it on things if you’re going to eat it later. But I’m not sure why you eat things later when you spray it on things when you’re doing products. But anyway, you can. And sometimes it’s a little thin. We went to some light smoke as well and tried some on that with the cup as well. But it does give you just that really soft kind of product shot type of smoke. Very surgical. You can use that or the dry ice mode to get things in on products. So this is a great device for products, steam in a cup, steam off from a steak, those kinds of things. If you’re doing food and products it’s a great device for that.

So let’s wrap this up. I love shooting smoke. I have shot smoke in probably more than 50% of my images through my entire career. I just think it gives such great depth. It gives you such cinematic look. I think these handheld devices like the SmokeNINJA Pro have made this so much easier to do and achievable. You don’t have to spend $1,000 for a smoke machine. You got one that is reasonably priced. You can do anything from food, products to portraits to some special effect kinds of things. So it really is a small device that allows you to work in small spaces and gives you control of smoke that I have not seen in my career.I hope you feel from the things that we’ve seen and looked at today why I think smoke is so important and why I think it’ll move your portraits to a whole new level. It really will bring your portraits from just an average kind of look to some really amazing things you can work with. It can be subtle. It can be more directional and more hard. But it just gives you a very cinematic look. These small devices like the SmokeNINJA Pro are tiny. It allows you to give smoke in places that were difficult to get before when it comes to products and things. But it also allows you to smoke large spaces. I feel like it’s a dawn of a new era. We’ve gone through the kind of off vape type things to something that really is a professional on set device. And I think the SmokeNINJA Pro really checks all those boxes. So I just want to thank everyone who helped us make this today; Sasha, we got Jesus, we got Michael, we got Alex and Julene. So thank you for being with us today. So there’s some more of our images shot with smoke. You keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!