Week 6: Smokey Cinthia's Café

 This post is not about smoke on the water, or when it get's in your eyes, but smoke from incense- and also fog and haze effects. 

 I enjoy lighting incense in the home mostly because of the nice scents, but recently I have noticed the way it plays with light and vice versa. I'm sure there are some fun quantum physics explanations, but I am basically writing about the general neatness of light coming through smoke and how you can see beams more clearly. I tried getting a good picture of what I'm describing, but either my affordable consumer level camera or lack of photography knowledge were getting in the way. If you ever light incense in the daytime and look closely at the thick little streams that come right from the end, you might be able to see a bit of the color spectrum- it's pretty neat. In general, I mostly see blues and cool colors.

Pachouli brand incense makes great swirls

  Smoke/fog/haze in the theatre in my bit of experience can be finicky but is really fun if done right. My first time really having to mess with fog and haze machines was in a community theatre production of London's famous Woman in Black. It's a classic two-actor ghost tale that is really chilling... as it is set in a 'pea soup fog' infested country side of England, we had two dry-ice fog machines and one liquid machine. After building some tubing and stuff to help it roll out we achieved a really neat billowy effect and it blanketed the stage as in a marsh... in a few scenes, the actor(s) are using real candle light as a primary or only source of the lighting on stage, and it was super creepy and awesome.
  If you got to see Orlando here, Dan had some pretty cool haze at the end of the show (that set off fire alarms one tech night because one door wasn't shut or open or who knows what, haha)... Whether it's in rock concerts (lasers and LED!), special effects, seedy cafés where actors smoke herbal cigarrettes, or in your own house--- yep, it's pretty cool.