Nice mood here ...

Love the shpes of the smoke. Little bright near the top, though

this reminds me of an old film

Beautiful shape of the smoke....Great effect....I would love to have shot such an image myself....Lovely work....Author if you could please also teach us all how did you do it....I would love to learn it...or atleast try such a thing....

thank you for all of your comments, and Govind to do smoke photography is not really that hard if you know how to, and its also very fun. here is the link to a tutorial that i followed http://www.jhoque.com/blog/how-to-photograph-smoke
..i think as long you got a dslr and a flashgun they should do it..and from this tutorial it is important how to set your camera..and ofcourse the key word here is PATIENCE!

Nice shot........Best of luck!!

Congrats for your third place!

great idea

Good one

Good thinking

Great idea. I was going to try something with a colored liquid other than water, but you beat me to it! Wish the refraction was a little more in focus, but good job!

i dont have a close up lens, i have taken 100s of shots...lol will try again with last go......lol

Author, if you have a macro setting on your camera, you don't need a macro lens, it's all about position of the camera. It is out of focus. I would try to figure out the macro setting and see if you get a better result.

nice idea and attempt, keep at it author...its a good angle you're working

great macro

great

nice macro

how!? what lens??

Very nice but can we get the shutter speed, lens, etc?

shutter speed : 1/1250seconds, lens: 35mm macro

Congrats for your first place!

Thanks for the info and congrats.

nicely done

High res is great.

that's awesome what did you do it with?

Thank you for asking outbackjack...
Here we go...
I took 6 cotton swabs,cut the heads off (to keep only the cotton because on my first try the plastic melt & the result wasn't very good) so..i place them on iron wire pieces that i cut & hold them with power tape on the edge of a table.
I place a mirror under them (i lift it a little bit so the pieces of the wire are not visible on the photo,i wanted only the flames to be visible)& from the same wire i cut some pieces to create the word FIRE & align them with the flames so they look like they are on fire.
I had only one chance at a time(before the cotton burned out) so i try it about 10 times (i had to cut brand new cotton pieces,pull out the burned ones,place the new ones back & light them up again,to make the proper settings on my camera,focus,aperture,f number etc).
Manual focus
F:8.0
1/250 shutter speed
Spot metering
Iso 100
Rotate the photo vertically & horizontally in PS so the reflection becomes the main image & the letters are visible(because "FIRE" looked like "ERIF" cause it's a reflection)
I hope i helped

I keep coming back to this entry. Honestly my favorite so far. It's kind of unfair though. I mean, this is really good and tough to compete with so most of us probably won't stand a chance.

Hats off to you . Grt.

How you didn't win is beyond me.