P#26 Q5B: The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Photograph Steam

Seeing the Big Picture

Ron Goldman: Oftentimes when someone is looking through the viewfinder, they blank out everything else that's in there because they're so busy looking at the main subject. They're really not paying attention to what's behind it and what's in the background.

Then they take a look at the photo on the computer and they see all kinds of distracting elements and things that they didn't even see while they were taking the image. It's very important, before you photograph steam, that while you're looking through the viewfinder at your subject you're spending an equal amount of time looking around and behind it.

It's very easy to move the camera a little bit and remove unwanted distractions from the image. It's a lot easier than trying to do it later in Photoshop or having to go back and re-do the shoot because there was something back there that you didn't see while you were taking the image.

With steam in particular, it's going to show up a lot better on a darker background than it is on a light background. So if you're in your kitchen and want to photograph steam and you have a window in the background, there's a pretty good chance you're not going to see any of the steam in the final image.

If you move something in-between the subject and whatever was behind it, you create your own background and you're very likely to have much better results.

Lighting from the side or slightly behind the steam is going to provide a much better chance of getting the steam illuminated. Lighting from the front or from directly overhead is going to make it very hard to get the steam to show up in the image.

In Closing

There can be plenty of steam when you're actually shooting your subject, but that doesn't mean the steam is going to show up in your photograph. If you want to photograph steam properly and you want it to show up in your shots, you have to work on proper lighting and direction.