I have wanted a fog machine for a while and recently made the purchase. Of course, I wanted to try it out! I always like to try things out before offering them to a client, which was especially a good idea in this case. I also have been collecting jewelry and accessories and have a few I thought would look cool for a witchy look. Everything pictured is in my studio wardrobe. The dress was put together with a piece of stretch jersey cotton with a belt to hold the look together. Wearing a strapless bra added some stability to the “dress”. This belt is a large size and is simply clamped in the back to hold it at my waist size. The detached sleeves are something I made to be added to any look to give it a puffy sleeve look and bonus as a cover-up when clients are insecure about their arms. The headpiece and earrings I ordered online and the necklace I found at a resale store.
I’m using an app on my Ipad with a timer to trigger the camera and see what the frame looks like. I set my strobe lights up first, I knew I wanted a backlight to light up some of the “smoke”. I’m using a water-based non-toxic, liquid fog in a fog machine to create this smokey look. I learned a couple of things right away; first, this stuff does indeed set up smoke alarms. Also, it’s incredibly dense and takes less than two minutes to completely fill even a large room with enough fog that it takes quite a while to clear out. When shopping for liquid fog, density seemed to be a bragging point, but now I realize that for parties where you’re trying to keep a space really spooky, it’s great. However, “fast dissipating” fog juice does exist and even though it’s a little harder to find, definitely put it on the shopping list for the next try-out.
I loved the look and now that I know that this is a good look, if I get a heads-up about my death, I should put this outfit on so that my ghost forever looks like witchy royalty.
It was a lot of work doing everything myself, although I do appreciate my husband’s handy work of removing all the smoke alarms as they began going off. I would add an assistant for this type of session though.
I do think that the fog was photographed really well and I loved all the texture it added to the images. I ended up editing some in cool tones and a couple in warm tones. I feel like you can really play with color tones quite a bit with this type of set-up.
Let me know what you think! I’d love to hear how you can imagine using fog in photographs.
I'd love to hear what you think about this set in the comments below. Could you see yourself being photographed this way? or are you picturing a different foggy scene?