This photo is of some nice blue smoke. That seems pretty obvious. Most people would go 'cool photoshop', but they'd be wrong in saying so. It's not photoshop.

I saw a tutorial on how to photograph smoke. Simple enough. Then they pulled the image into Photoshop and modified it to add color. I thought to myself 'neat, but I don't want to do it that way'. So the gears in my head started turning.

Here's the end result:

And here's how I did it: I grabbed a black background (something not really reflective) and a flash. Tossed the flash and remote trigger on a light stand and then threw on 2 blue gels (one didn't have enough punch). To get the light to play nice, I added two small flags. That way I knew the light would shoot straight, and not spill out onto the background, or into the lens. Lit up some insense, clamped it up, and then killed the lights in my room. Ever try focusing on something in the dark? Yeah, that was the hard part.

Below is the setup. Nice and simple no?

The only thing I had to change in post processing was to increase the exposure. That's it that's all. Not a bad photo overall I'd say.