How did I get these? I can tell you the simple part. I darkened my office, and used a black poster board as a background. The smoke came from an incense stick. I had a speed light on the side to light the smoke. A few trial and error shots to get a few descent shots of the smoke.

The processing is the fun part, the creative part. I usually start by isolating the best parts of the smoke photo, and often black out extraneous portions. Then I use various filters on the resulting image. I love Topaz Glow, and also Smart Photo Editor. They are easy and give some interesting results. I sometimes change something with Photoshop, and nearly always tweak things with Lightroom. I never do the same thing twice, and I usually go through several steps to get where I end up, so I can't really tell you the details of any particular one. The last photo, the Twirlie, started as usual. I used Topaz Glow to bring out some of the colors, and then I put it through the Twirlie process. Finally, to get the symmetry, I simply duplicated the best half of the photo and dragged as a mirror image to the other side. I've attached a photo of the smoke that I started with, and another photo with the Twirlie process I used. As you can see, the unprocessed smoke photos are rather bland.