I was messing around with my camcorder and got the idea to tape a smoking candle (no it isn't cigarette smoke

). I captured a series of images from the tape and imported them into Flash.
That's it. Once the images are in Flash you can manipulate the colors and stuff. Not too hard really. The hardest part was keeping the candle smoke going while I was taping.
You should give it a try if you have a digital camcorder and Flash. Then again you could probably do it with any good camera and probably any photo editing software. Flash is how I did it, I did so because I wanted the smoke animated.
Casper