Decay

Decay can be a great abstractor producing e.g. rust with beautiful colors and fascinating patterns. But abandoned houses open to weather and forgotten in time you can also offer some interesting abstracts.
Like these walls where the color and plaster eroded and left strange cracks, lines, and blotches.
Found in Kolmanskop, Namibia.

One on One

If you're using a macro lens like the Tamron 90/2.8 VC (F017) you are deep into abstract territory!
We humans are not used to see things up so close. So any shot approaching magnifications of 1:1 ("one on one" ;-) is going to be a bit off the normal scale.
Just captured these orchids in preparation for a shoot-out in my photography club with the topic of ... orchids.
I'd like to capture more of the color than the form of the orchids. So I was looking for a highly abstract rendering of the plant. Not sure that I succeeded though regarding the "highly" part...

Cause and effect

I love this one from a macro-shooting at our local photography club:



Well,  everybody knows that depth-of-field is really slim in macro-shots as it shrinks with the square of the magnification. So some promote focus-stacking to get more dof.
Or you live with it and enjoy the resulting blur from using f5.6 which in this case renders the image in the top-half/background abstract.
Or to be honest: The image was abstract to begin with, as it is simply the artist's palette ;-)

Abstract Nature?

Well, you could always find some pretty abstract images in nature. This one is from a round-trip in Namibia where we visited the famous "Organ Pipes" at Twyfelfontain. The Basalt structures lend themselves easily to some form of abstract photography as they seem to defy the normal expectations of "nature".
I processed every color out of this image except for orange and yellow which already seemed to be the dominant colors in this shot.
Enjoy!

Experimental Staircase

Here's a more experimental development of the staircase below with a pretty complicated (at least for me) merge in Photoshop of four different layers:



I like the puzzle-like quality of the colored patches upon the gray-and-white "ground plan". And I like the element of random-ness when the patches were created by separating the lightest and the darkest areas of the original image.

But as I sifted through the myriads of filters in PS I found it (again) pretty hard to pre-visualize any of those effects and was pretty fast lost. I had an idea of what I liked to do but never even came close. So this image is sort of a by-product of my research into the depth of filter algorithms...

It depends...

The following image is not really abstract but a nice reduction of a staircase to geometry none-the-less:

It was shot from below looking up and I developed it in a high-key way and further reduced distracting coloration in post-processing.

How much different the view from the top was!



The colors of the floor and the railing plus the bright lights cast by the sun shining through the windows were all absent from the shot from below.
Fascinating how a change of perspective can produce totally different images of the same thing!

A little more abstract

Now this one should be more than 10% abstract:



... and I hope you didn't immediately recognize it for what it is ;-)
I love the swirling,  bubbling, and chaotic structures in this one. Plus the reduction in color.
Processing was pretty straight forward in Lightroom, the main lever being a completely inverted curve, which produces the effect of a negativ film.

Hope you like it!

Experiment

Defocus is a great way to abstractify images, but if nothing is sharp at all in the image I often find the result not satisfying. That leads to the idea to superimpose or merge a second sharp image of the same scene like I've done here.
Today I tried with different processing of the individual images before merging them in Photoshop and also a different algorithm to calculate the composite. As Photoshop has an overwhelming number of methods it was a bit trial and error, but I like the end-result:

Blurred Tulips

Just came back from shooting black (and white) tulips for an upcoming foto contest.
After doing the obvious stills from the bouquet I went wild with some long-exposure experiments with moving camera. Lots of shots, little satisfying results - but I knew from experience that you have to be patient.
Two shots came out in a way I liked: The first one called "Tumbling Tulips" was shot at 1 second during which I turned the camera:



I like the dynamics suggesting a vase tumbling over. But I can assure you: no flowers (or vases) were harmed in this experiment ;-)
The second shot was of the "drop the camera" type at 1/4 sec. Called "White Space":



The colors and contrast was tweaked in post-processing. And naturally the images needed some amount of cropping. But everything else in these compositions comes straight out of the camera from a single long-exposure shot..

A little abstract

Well, here we go again: is "abstract" absolute? In my opinion absolutely not! There are so many degrees of abstractification when you look at photography.
And if you define an easily recognizable well exposed subject in a full color photograph as the most realistic image (although lacking 3D) then anything from a black-and-white conversion or a crop that masks the true nature of the subject is already somewhere towards the abstract.
On a scale from totally realistic/easily recognizable (=0%) towards a fully abstract image (=100%) I'd rate the following perhaps at only 10% abstract. It depends a little on how fast you recognize the subject. Enjoy!

Uprooted

Trees are very high on my photography list and I love it when winter has bared them of all leaves. You see more of their structure / personality and the ever spreading branches and twigs against a bright sky are a nice challenge for any lens.
I captured this one and thought about pulling it off from reality into in upturned "alterverse" where up is down and black is white. This works quite well with trees as the treetop has a certain semblance of their roots.
So here goes: