June 30, 2010

Seagull and Rust

Not sooo abstract, but nonetheless one of my favorites.

Rusty Sky:
Rusty Sky 23251

I love the battle of the blues, the tufftiness of the clouds in contrast to the cold geometry of that rusty container, and that singular seagull sailing across (although it's a little small to my liking).

The shot was taken at 10mm which is always a challenge, as a lot of landscape/sky maps onto the sensor with more highlights and shadows than on a normal shot.
But in this case the dynamic range was manageable. I shot (as usual) with -1EV dialed in and relied on the D300 to nail the exposure. I still got highlight-warning in the reflections of sun in the left-most metal. But I decided to get away with it and even chose some +0.5EV in post-processing to give the blue of the container more glow.

If you click through the image above you can get up to 1920x1200 in size. Enjoy!

June 25, 2010

One Second

Here is my series from one walk at dusk:

Trees:
Trees 20591

Bow:
Bow 20572

Dusk:
Dusk 20570

Looming:
Looming 20588
To appreciate this image, you should click through to the larger flickr-version!

Flash:
Flash 20602

All were shot at 1 second, -1EV and with a 50mm lens which was easy to rotate around the horizontal axis during exposure (only "Bow" was captured with rotating the camera around the optical axis).
If you ask me whether I rotated up or down, I honestly don't know. Only thing I know is that I tried a good many combinations of moving and holding to get these results. And was really happy to have a DSLR at hand so that I could review the results immediately. It was quite a hit and miss thing and the results highly random at first. But after getting the hang of it and seeing what worked and what not it became gradually easier.

I have a nice slideshow with images from this series here. Enjoy!

This series was really inspired by the Miyelo series from Viggo Mortensen. His images of dancing Indians performing their traditional Lakota Ghost Dance seem to capture the spirit of this people in a wonderful way. And as I love to capture trees and their "spirit" I immediately saw this technique as interesting. See an interesting overview of his art, music & poetry.

I hope you find the results as inspiring as I.

June 22, 2010

Next up

I have to take to the task of presenting my favorite series "One Second" which combines one of my favorite subjects trees with the technique of motion blur from a camera that moves through the one second exposure time.
So consider this an announcement of things to come which has the dual role to put myself under pressure to deliver upon my promises :~)
As the motion blur will mostly come from rotating the camera/lens-combo around the x-axis (in aerobatics called "pitch") while the shutter is open you will get quite a practical impression of what "rotomerge" means...

June 21, 2010

Paint and Rust

Often you see rust in combination with paint which was applied to stop the decay.
I have found a good many examples at the North-Sea where the constant salt-water breeze puts most constructs from wood or metal at risk of fast deterioration.
This makes for some some nice photographic opportunities:

79:
79 25176

Blue-Yellow:
Blue-Yellow 25167

Shut:
Shut 18698

Btw.: If you want to know what sort of abstract art you can produce with the non-painterly use of paints and other colorful liquids have a look over there at the flickr-set alchemy by jedw.40cat.
And only photography makes it possible for us to view these extraordinary arrangements/experiments!

June 20, 2010

Rust

Natural abstracticism - is there such a thing?
Well, yes! One of my favorites is the effect of water (especially salt-water) on metal: It's commonly known as rust.
It produces the organic type of abstract figures and can add some wonderfully wild colors too. Let me show you some of the images I like (btw.: the header of my blog is also made from rust).

Orange Blue;
Orange Blue 25490

Black Hole Sun:
Black Hole Sun 25488

Rust 18697:
Rust 18697

And finally two not so abstract but again nicely textured by rust, ReCoil:
Re-Coil 25619

Machine:
Rust 23494

The colors were a little emphasized in post but as always: I only brought out what was already there in the original image.
.