From the moment I saw his face I have been anxious to take photos of the Turkish boy.

ALLAH and SEKS – these were the first things Ali noticed in Estonia. Indeed, all stores tried to have the biggest signs of allahindlus (‘discount’ in Estonian); ‘seks’ is just a quite common ending of Estonian words so can often be seen on the labels too.

I had taken a quick set of portraits of Ali, but even though he has naturally handsome face on all of them, none of the photos were spectacular enough to be published. Ali particularly did not like source photo of these images because of the questionable facial expression, but he was satisfied with the result.

Last night I learned to smoke (on Photoshop) for this project. Creating smoke, just as hair, has always been mystery I haven’t been able to figure out. So I started learning with a nice tutorial, but from some point went my own way with it. ‘Shape blur’ filter helped me to great the nice smoke from the two leach-like stripes. Background was created with radial gradient and Clouds Rendering. On first photo Fiber Rendering was additionally used.

I could not make up my mind about which version I like more, so here are both of the versions.