Summer Planter
I have a dilemma. My camera is not working properly and a new one is not yet in the budget. I don’t know what to do – try to get it repaired, start setting aside money for the newer version or even more for a better version. When I’m in this liminal space, I need to let things sit for awhile and wait for the right answer to come. I don’t have any big trips coming up and I still have my iPhone. Life is good.
My camera still operates, but I can’t change the aperture. Having limitations is a great way to spark creativity, so I planned a photo walk with my camera and a 50 mm lens. With the camera on automatic, the aperture was stuck at f/1.4, wide open, so very shallow depth of field. I turned on manual focus and dialled it all the way in for extreme closeups. When the lens was pointed towards the big picture landscape, scenes appeared in the viewfinder as a total blur.
I was seeing impressions of spring.
Queen Street Corner
Abstract impressions can be created by going in close or through intentional camera movement or blur. With these impressions, details are lost and the focus becomes colour and texture, shapes and lines. It’s a different way of seeing. It’s a way to play and break the “rule” of having everything in sharp focus. Life is a blur, after all.
Lake Ontario Impression
This is one of the many exercises we do in the Going Abstract workshop, which will be offered again this November.
I love how you turned lemons into lemonade! Your blurry images are wonderful — definitely impressionistic.
I love the blurs too – your camera has decided on the type of image that is appropriate for now! I especially like the summer planter and Lake Ontario. Sometimes we blur our photos intentionally and sometimes they happen. I love that you’ve gone with the flow of the situation!
I discovered the fun of blur by accident last Christmas, when I was using an Olloclip macro lens on my iPhone to photograph ornaments on the tree. When I backed away and pressed the shutter by mistake, I got a wonderful image of blurry, round spots of colored light against a soft, dark background. Now you’ve made me want to try it outside, on purpose, and see what I can get.
Oh, I LOVE that you discovered it by accident!
Hi Kim – I just love these blurred images… Leaves so much to the imagination. It happens to me by mistake when I don’t realize my finger is still on the trigger and I pull the camera away. Or at night when I take a photo out the closed window with flash and it just comes back with blurred bubbles. Magical… Anyway – you can be even more creative with them by using the Adobe Fireworks tool, and giving them a “zoom blur.” It gets even more abstract. 🙂