Who doesn’t miss those 3-packs of smoke bombs from the ice cream man? We sure do. So a few months ago when I was loading up a feature for Mat Blackwell’s Pink 1992 Nissan Silvia S13, I came across an awesome picture of his Silvia here with a color matched pink smoke bomb, and I thought wow, this is cool.
Featuring a few hundred more cars, and regular work stuff later, I forgot about these smokers. Recently though, cruising through the IG feed I saw a sponsored post from Smoke Effect. This wasn’t the first ad for smoker I’d seen, but we had some down time at the shop after busting out some videos and other features, and thought might as well buy some, a do a review for the website.
We initially settled on the 30 second mini smoke grenade for the price, the available color options, and the fact that you can grab a lot of pictures in 30 seconds. We purchased 2 blue, 1 yellow and 1 teal. We plan to do a blue for each our shop Blue STI and my Blue Volvo. And then a yellow for me to pay thanks to the Swedish flag and the country that gave me my ride, and Derek settled on teal as an accent for his STI. We are going to do two each, which gives us about 60 seconds of shoot time.
After going through the whole process, we learned that our reading comprehension skills were lacking that day. The 30 seconds are not recommended for photo shoots, but rather the 90 second is what you want. We ordered up a new group of these, so don’t make the same mistake as us. If you’re shooting your car, get a handful of the 90 second grenades.
Photo Courtesy of SmokeEffect.com
The price point doesn’t break the bank at all, coming in at just $11.99 each. Upon checkout is when we saw a bit of a price jump, and this was due to the shipping. There was only one option, and it was $36…. Yeah, pretty pricing for such a small package. I reached out to Smoke Effect, and they confirmed it was due to the HAZMAT required shipping. Well, that does make sense I guess. Shipping a “grenade” probably does require some extra care and hoops to jump through with shipping companies. Long story short, we ordered them up and went about our day.
5 days later, FedEx brought this package up to the shop. Not to bad on the shipping time considering it had to be ground shipping and was coming from a few states over.
After opening up the package, the packaging from smoke effect looked like this
After reading the enclosed instructions… we started mapping out our plan of attack. We don’t know how much attention these are going to attract, or the local legality of these, so we are going to try and set up camera, pull the grenade pin, aggressively shoot with a few iPhones, then high tail it out of there to another, far away location. And piggy backing on this plan is why we didn’t pic black as a color choice, not with all the recent wildfires here in SoCal.
First location, the back of an abandoned Kmart. All the makings for a good shoot. Industrial style tall brick walls, 10 foot loading dock for depth of image… and not too much traffic. Here we will do our first combination which is the Blue 2006 Volvo S40 T5 AWD (soon to ad M66 to the resume). We set up the tripod camera to document the whole shaabam, and got ready to go.
picture of car and tripod with camera.
We all got ready, decided where to place the grenade and we all took different positions around the car to snap some pictures. We had a trigger man so we could grab a few angles and not worry about activating the device, and having to shoot images. We also had a few gallons of water on stand-by just in case. It was go time, and we made sure to document the whole thing on video here for you.
video of first smoker.
Overall, according to plan. Dense and bright smoke. The product worked about how we expected it would. One thing to note is….. Between us, we grabbed about 80 pictures and here is our favorite from this location.
pic of first shoot
Next was my Swedish Flag tribute (Yellow on Blue). Here we decided to bomb and shoot at a….. Same plan of attack as before, and here is our best picture from that location.
pic 2
Next it was time to shift gears to the STI. We have a blue and a teal lined up and headed to the next location. Here we wanted to do something a bit different, so we ended up ……… And First up was good old trusty blue smoke, never let us down yet. Here is our favorite image from that.
sti blue pic
Lastly we ended up at ………. Popped our teal, shot, and here you go.
sti teal smoke.
All in, we would say the $60 all in we spent was well worth it. We wont have a pile of these in the truck on call, but anytime we are looking to do a cool shoot, we will order up a set of them.
Easy to use, no cleanup, and just a good overall product. We recommend these at a 5 star level. You can go over and get some of these, or some of their Dual Vent 25 second rigs. Find them all here: Smoke Effect Website.
