Post #100

Well, just found out that this would be my 100th post on my blog dedicated to the abstract in photography.
So let's put away with lens-testing or with a little out-of-focus play and celebrate this with a suitably abstract image, aptly named

Transfiguration:



Now with me being a lens-tester and all everybody expects me to shoot brick-walls, hehe! But there are much more interesting targets: Siemens-stars for lens-testing and reflectively tiled walls for self-portraits. Yes, believe it or not, this is a "selfy" :)
Had to do some tweaking of the contrast with curves and remove some distracting blotches. But other than that it's almost straight out of the camera.

Thoughts on reflections

The example of a reflective shot in the previous post show-cases some of the distinctive effects you can achieve by shooting into some reflective surface:
- The image acquires a tint from the color of the reflective surface. If strong enough the original colors are drained out and you get a two-toned image*
- the reflected image becomes structured by the uneven surface*
- you can use the frame of the reflector for creating a frame around your subject that's often astonishing, like a puddle after rain.
- you can play objects on the surface against the reflected image of the background in ways that are often not possible without the reflector (like your own person, or clouds that reflect in water or other wet surfaces)

And there are other quite interesting effects that do not show up in this specific example:
- Esp. when shooting against wet surfaces on ground level while standing on them you create the illusion of a "submerged" vantage point. For this effect to work properly it helps to display the image upside down so that the reflected subjects appear in their normal upright position.
- You can show the front and the (reflected) backside of a subject at the same time, sort of "bending the light" around your subject
- With curved reflectors (like Christmas tree balls) you get a strong warping of the subject
- Capturing the original and the reflected subject in one image creates symmetry
- Or you use the reflective surface simply to project additional (colored, structured) light on your subject. Which seems the least "intrusive" way of using a reflector.

Btw. If you want to find all my blogposts related to the topic of reflections simply click on the label "reflection" under this post or head over to the page "Use Keyword Search!" and click on the respective keyword there.
There you can find further examples of the effects described above.

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*does not work when you use a mirror, so mirrors are not as interesting as other reflective surfaces.

Re-Flections

Next-up will be some thoughts about the abstractifying powers of reflections:



I'm just posting this so you can enjoy one of the most interesting shots I did while visiting (again) one of the most beautiful cities in North-Holland: Alkmaar.
Will post some thoughts on the special effects of this image after a short break...

Slow Reveal

Inspired by some reading of Michael Freeman's "The Photographer's Mind" in the chapter "The Reveal" I tried to set up a slightly puzzling image with one of my favorite subjects: Trees.
Found an opportunity today while strolling along the bank of an old canal with an alley of trees on the other side. The snow on the fields and the ice on the canal got some battering as temperatures rose almost to +10°C and everything was wet and glistening.

Captured with the new AF-S 35/1.4G (but I think that hardly mattered ;) ) and some post-processing in LR3

Mirror Wood 1:


Mirror Wood 2:

Warped Reality

Mirrors are nice props to produce interesting images, reflecting the unexpected or combining different views into one image.
Warped mirrors (or to be precise mirroring surfaces) are even more fun to play with and are great reality modifiers. Just walk up to the chrome parts of a bike and watch with a photographers eye!
Here's one I captured recently, called

Warped Reality:

(Curved) Glass and Patterns

Here are two examples I captured in Auckland. What astonished me most was the distorted reflections in the windows of the high-rise. This is an indicator of how curved the glass was and adds a nice layer of abstraction to this images.

Glasshouse:


Reflections:

Photographs and Paintings

Just to kick off things a bit further I remembered an interesting thread at the Nikongear forum about Photographs and Paintings.
My thoughts on this were:
"Let's put photo-realistic paintings aside for a while.
I think paintings show ways of abstraction from / transformation of a photographic reproduction that are interesting to photographers. Abstraction can make the image/viewer focus more on the "grand scheme" like the colors, the light, the main geometric form etc. This is at least for me a source of inspiration.
Unfortunately for us photographers we only have limit means to achieve abstraction unless we use post-processing: dof/oof, motion blur, shake.
...
Ah well, come to think of it: there is also the use of filters or other "optically active"/reflective/refractive subjects in a scene like water/waves, glass, metal, smoke/fog, hot air, flare."

And here's another image that shows how you can "abstractify" a tree using its reflection on water:

As always you can click through the image in this post to its flickr-page where there is more information about it and also larger versions.