Solder Smoke Patterns

I’ve been soldering circuits for years and I’ve come to notice that solder creates a thick, milky smoke cloud when melted. For this shot I positioned a Sunpak flash unit to the side of the smoke source using an off camera flash cord. I used a sheet of black poster board for the background and also a piece of poster board to focus the flash output onto the smoke cloud. By playing with the air currents in the area, the shape if the resulting cloud could be controlled and changed.

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